measures of central tendency and dispersion

• Strength and limitation of range

  • Easy to calculate
  • Affected by extreme values and doesnt show distribution 
  • Use with ordinal or highly skewed
• Strength and limitation of mean 

  • Most sensitive measure of central tendency as it takes into account exact distance between all values of all the data
  • Can be easily distorted by extreme values and can’t be used with nominal
• Strength and limitation of median 

  • Appropriate for ordinal and not affected by extremes (used to describe non normal distributions)
  • Exact values not reflected in final calculation - not as sensitive 
• Strength and limitation of mode 

  • Unaffected by extreme values and is only measures applicable to categories
  • Not useful with several modes and doesn’t tell us anything about other values
• Strength and limitation of standard deviation

  • precise as it take all exact values into account 
  • may hide some characteristics like extreme values
  • difficult to calculate, does not show the full range of the data