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Easily telling people about your data

Collecting data can be easy and fun. But sometimes it can be hard to tell other people about what you have found. That’s why we use statistics. Two kinds of statistics are frequently used to describe data. They are measures of central tendency and dispersion. These are often called descriptive statistics because they can help you describe your data.

Mean, median and mode

These are all measures of central tendency. They help summarize a bunch of scores with a single number. Suppose you want to describe a bunch of data that you collected to a friend for a particular variable like height of students in your class. One way would be to read each height you recorded to your friend. Your friend would listen to all of the heights and then come to a conclusion about how tall students generally are in your class But this would take too much time. Especially if you are in a class of 200 or 300 students! Another way to communicate with your friend would be to use measures of central tendency like the mean, median and mode. They help you summarize bunches of numbers with one or just a few numbers. They make telling people about your data easy.

Range, variance and standard deviation

These are all measures of dispersion. These help you to know the spread of scores within a bunch of scores. Are the scores really close together or are they really far apart? For example, if you were describing the heights of students in your class to a friend, they might want to know how much the heights vary. Are all the men about 5 feet 11 inches within a few centimeters or so? Or is there a lot of variation where some men are 5 feet and others are 6 foot 5 inches? Measures of dispersion like the range, variance and standard deviation tell you about the spread of scores in a data set. Like central tendency, they help you summarize a bunch of numbers with one or just a few numbers.