Measures of Central Tendency

Measures of central tendency provide a single summary number that captures the general location of a set of data points. This measure should be a good representation of the set of data. There are three common measures of central tendency used: the mean, the median, and the mode. Depending on the characteristics of the data, one measure may be more appropriate to use than the others.

The mean and the median are most commonly used to summarize data that can take on many different values (i.e., continuous data); the mode is often used to summarize data that can only take on a finite number of specific values (i.e., categorical data). The construction of each measure is illustrated with the gender and height data in Table 1 ...