Measures of Central Tendency With Outlier

The purpose of using a measure of central tendeny (the mean, median, or mode) is to help your reader have an idea of what was the 'typical' value in your data set. The mean, median, and mode are referred to as measures of central tendency because they (1) tend to be in the middle of the data set where (2) the frequency is the highest. The mean is by far the favored measure of central tendency to report, since it includes ALL of the values in its calculation. However, there are times when the mean is NOT the best measure of what is 'typical.' For example, when there is an outlier - beware. The outlier tends to drag the mean away from the 'center' of the data and toward the outlier itself. In that case, researchers will typically also be sure to report the median... which is robust, and not affected by outliers. Watch the video to learn more....

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Education

Tags:

• measures of central tendency
• mean
• median
• mode
• outlier
• extreme value
• extreme score