Some statistics

Last week we covered a fairly exciting section of the research methods specification - measures of dispersion and measures of central tendency. You need to know:

• How to calculate the mean, mode & median
• When it is appropriate to use each - ie the mean is affected by extreme scores so it might be best to use the median when you have lots of these, and the mode is best used for nominal (categoric) data
• How to calculate the range and when to use it
• What the standard deviation is and when to use it. You don't need to do the maths here but the standard deviation is a measure of the spread of the data around the mean.

This is all well covered in your textbook so do make your own notes as well.