measures of central tendency

• measures of central tendency provide information on ‘typical’ values for a data set
• the mean is when you add all the scores and divide by the number of values
• the mean takes exact distance between all variables into account but it is easily distorted by extreme variables, cannot be used with nominal data and cannot be used with discrete values
• the median is the middle value when items are placed in order
• the median is unaffected by extreme scores, appropriate for ordinal data and is easier to calculate than the mean but exact values are not reflected in the final calculation
• the mode is the most common value
• there may be multiple modes