Measures of central tendency By Lubna Toheed Introduction Measures of central tendency describe how the data cluster together around a central point. It is useful for making comparisons between groups of individuals or between sets of figures. It reduces a large number of measurements to a single figure, and thus makes comparisons easy. Unfortunately, there is no single, standard procedure for determining central tendency. The problem is that no single measure will always produce a typical, representative value in every situation. Therefore, we use different ways to measure central tendency. There are three common measures of central tendency: 1. The Mean or Average or arithmetic Mean, 2. The median and , 3. The mode. These three statistical measures are computed differently and have different characteristics. Here we will discuss ‘Mean’ and ‘Median’ only. Mean The Mean of a distribution is known is “Arithmetic Mean”. Mean indicate the
