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Discussion Week 3 - Central Tendency & Variability

The document discusses analyzing two variables, sex and age, from a survey dataset. Sex is a categorical variable with two categories, male and female, while age is a continuous variable ranging from 18 to over 89 years old. For the continuous age variable, the document shows measures of central tendency like mean, median, and mode as well as measures of variability like standard deviation, variance, range, minimum, and maximum. For the categorical sex variable, only frequency counts can be measured and not central tendency or variability.

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Fredrick Ombako
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72 views

Discussion Week 3 - Central Tendency & Variability

The document discusses analyzing two variables, sex and age, from a survey dataset. Sex is a categorical variable with two categories, male and female, while age is a continuous variable ranging from 18 to over 89 years old. For the continuous age variable, the document shows measures of central tendency like mean, median, and mode as well as measures of variability like standard deviation, variance, range, minimum, and maximum. For the categorical sex variable, only frequency counts can be measured and not central tendency or variability.

Uploaded by

Fredrick Ombako
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Discussion Week 3: Central Tendency and Variability

The categorical variable selected is sex (male/female) and the continuous variable
selected is age of respondent (which begins from 18 years). These variables are
selected from the General Social Survey dataset shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1: General Social Survey dataset

Age is a metric level variable with an input ranging from 18 years to over 89 years.
Central tendency measures for this variable can be mean, mode, and median.
Variability (or dispersion) measures can be standard deviation, variance, range,
minimum, and maximum. This is shown in Table 1.
Sex is a categorical variable where the respondent is either male or female. For this
variable, it is not possible to measure either the central tendency measures such as
mean or the measures of dispersion such as standard deviation. However, one can
request frequency charts on the variable as shown in Figure 2.
One can examine, from the two variables, the gender differences in age structure of
the respondents in the survey.

Table 1: Central tendency and variability measures of age as a continuous variable

AGE OF RESPONDENT
N
Valid
2529
Missin
9
g
Mean
49.01
Median
49.00
Mode
53a
Std. Deviation
17.412
Variance
303.173
Range
71
Minimum
18
Maximum
89
a. Multiple modes exist.
The smallest value is
shown

Figure 2: Bar chart for sex as a categorical variable

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