Measures of Central Tendency
Discussion: Measures of Central Tendency One of the main goals of data analysis is to describe data in a succinct manner so that it is easily understandable; this is called data reduction. To succinctly describe data, measures of central tendency (that is, mean, median, and mode) can be used. For example, suppose you collect data on the arrest records of inmates in a particular region. From your data, you might want to determine the most common offenses committed by inmates. If each offense is measured nominally (for example, armed robbery = 1, murder = 2, and aggravated assault = 3), determining the mode would show which offense is committed most frequently. You might also want to determine the number of offenses typically committed by inmates (ratio level of measurement) prior to being sentenced to prison. To do this, you could calculate the mean, or the average number of offenses committed by inmates. You also could rank the number of offenses from the highest to the lowest to ...