What are the measures of central tendency and dispersion? Full Explained

Measures that tells us about the approximate center of a distribution are known as measures of central tendency.

Central tendency and dispersion: Collecting data can be easy and fun. But sometimes it can be hard to tell other people about you data. At that point, we use statistics to collect, analyze, interpret, present, and organize data the data we have.

Two kinds of statistics are mostly used to describe data. These are measures of central tendency and measures of dispersion. These are often called descriptive statistics because they can help us describe your data.

In this article, we will discuss about the measures of central tendency and dispersion along with important formulas.

What are the measures of central tendency ?

A measure of central tendency tells us about the center or middle of a set of data values. The commonly used measures of central tendency are mean, median, and mode.

Central tendency helps us to summarize the groups of data with a single number. Let say we want to describe the bunch of data that we collected from a friend for a particular thing like marks of students (for any particular subjects) in our class. There are two ways to do this , One way would be read each students marks that we collected by our friend. Our friend would listen to all the marks of every students in our class and then we analyze the data about the marks of every students.

But you know this would take our lots of time and efforts. Especially if we are in a class of 400 or 500 students! Another way to tell your friends would be to use the measures of central tendency like the mean, median and mode.

They help you summarize bunches of numbers of data with one or just a few numbers. They just helps us to tell about our data easily.

What are the measures of central dispersion ?

Measures that tells us about the spread of the data are measures of dispersion. These measures include the range, upper and lower quartiles, variance, and standard deviation.

Range, variance and standard deviation are all measures of dispersion. These help us to know about the spread of scores within a groups of scores.

Lets take a example about this , If you want to describe the weights of students in your class to your friend,or the student want to know about the weight how much weight they vary. Are all the men in the class are within the same weight around 70 kg to 80 kg or it is different so there is a lot of variation in different kind of weight. So measures of dispersion like standard deviation, range and variation tells us about the spread score in a data set it is like a central tendency which helps us to sumrise a bunch of number of data within a one or just a few numbers.

why do we need statistics ?

Some faqs about the measures of central tendency and dispersion?