Measures Of Central Tendency Essay Examples

Consider the case of records of the time taken by a researcher from her residence to the place of work daily for the next ten days. The amount of time taken in minutes is given by 55,64,63,69,62,64,56,64,59,55.
The mean time taken by the respondent is given by 61 minutes. The median time taken is 62.5 and the mode of the time taken to reach the place of work is given by 64. These values are obtained through the use of Excel which is a statistical analysis tool. Most of them can, however, be computed through the use of mathematical formulas. The mean is obtained by summing all the values of the time taken to reach the destination and then dividing by the count. The sum is 610 minutes and dividing by the count that is ten we obtain a mean of 61. The median is obtained by arranging the values in ascending order and picking the middle value. The count of our values is however even and as a result we will have to add the two middle values and divide by two in order to obtain the median. The mode is the most repeated value, and we obtain it by assigning frequencies to our quantities and picking a quantity with the highest frequency. It is obtained to be 64. The values are as expected since there are no outliers that might affect our measures of central tendency.
The most appropriate measure of central tendency for the data under consideration is the mean. This is because its computation involves all the values of a variable. The fact that there are no outliers in this variable is also an added advantage since the mean is the most affected by outliers when compared to other measures of central tendency.
The boxplot is included in the appendix.
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