Measures of Central Tendency

Measures of Central TendencyConsider a time
when you took an exam in school and received your results. Your score
meant more when you also knew how everyone else performed in comparison.
More than just knowing the average score, maybe you were also able to
see how many students scored higher and lower than you.Measures
of central tendency and variability can offer insight into large data
sets. They differ, however, in that central tendency can tell you an
average or typical data point (e.g., exam score average), whereas
variability can tell you even more, such as how far each data point
differs from the average or mean as well as how spread out around the
mean all of the data points are. How much a score deviates from the mean
can help you better understand a group of scores or numbers that you
want to summarize or describe. Consider, for example, that one well-paid
individual’s salary is $100,000, while the majority of salaries are
closer to $50,000. How might that one high score influence each measure
of central tendency? Would it cause you to believe one measure of
central tendency is a better summary of salary than another? These
questions are important ones to consider as both consumers and producers
of research. In this Discussion, you evaluate the choices of using
different measures of central tendency and variability to summarize
data.Scenarios: Consider the
following two scenarios. In scenario one, you are a restaurateur,
seeking to open a restaurant. In the other scenario, you are hoping to
attract a restaurant to your town. Consider how measures of central
tendency and variability can help you communicate information about data
and think about why.As the restaurateur, what
measures of central tendency and variability would you want to know
about before making your decision? Would one measure of central tendency
be more important to you than another? Why?As an individual
hoping to attract a restaurant to your town, would your response be the
same? Include at least one example of each of the following measures of
central tendency and variability in your discussion response: mean,
median, mode, range, and standard deviation.