Tag Archives: central tendency

Using SPSS: Descriptive Statistics

Leave a reply

Sometimes you’ll want to get some basic information on the data you have. Running these descriptive statistics is pretty straight forward. First, click the Analyze button, hover over the Descriptive Statistics tab, and then you’ll be able to choose a few different options. I prefer just clicking the frequencies button because it gives you the option to look at frequencies as well as other kinds of descriptives.

Continue reading →

Statistics: Measures of Central Tendency

Leave a reply

Central Tendency

Central tendency is a statistical measure; a single score to define the center of a distribution. It is also used to find the single score that is most typical or best represents the entire group. No single measure is always best for both purposes. There are three main types:

  • Mean: sum of all scores divided by the number of scores in the data, also referred to as the average.
  • Median: the midpoint of the scores in a distribution when they are listen in order from smallest to largest. It divides the scores into two groups of equal size. With an even number of scores, you compute the average of the two middle scores.
  • Mode: the most frequently occurring number(s) in a data set.

Here are a variety of videos to help you understand the concepts of these measures, finding the median using a histogram, and finding a missing value given the mean. Continue reading →