Measures of Central Tendency

Now that you have this data set, you need to determine how you are going to summarize the data you have collected, in a way that makes it interesting and easy for readers to understand. Statistics (such as measures of central tendency) are used to obtain information about a population from a sample set of observed values.

Measures of central tendency are some of the most rudimentary ways of summarizing your data, and they do so in a way that is quick and easy for a reader to understand. Measures of central tendency are used to show where the data is centered or clustered. There are three measures of central tendency:

  1. Mean: average of the data
  2. Median: the middle value of the data
  3. Mode: the most frequent value in the data

As mentioned earlier, not all methods of summarizing and describing data can be used for all variables. It is important to understand which measures of central tendency can be used for the types of variables we have previously described.