RLO: Descriptive statistics for interval and ratio scale data

 

Mean

The mean is also called the average, and is the most frequently used measure of central tendency. In our 'street' each person has their own age in years. We can work out their average age by adding up all the individual ages and dividing the total by the number of people in the group. It may be that some people in the group have the same age as the calculated mean but there will be others who do not. The mean is useful for us because it helps us to understand something of the overall characteristic of the data. For example, if the average age was only 19 years this would indicate that our 'street' had a lot of young folk in it, but if the mean was 65 years then we would know that more older people lived there.

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