Measures of Dispersion

Charan Singh Rayat
Additional contact information
Charan Singh Rayat: Postgraduate Institute of Medical Education & Research, Department of Histopathology

Chapter 7 in Statistical Methods in Medical Research, 2018, pp 47-60 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract The dispersion may be defined as “the extent to which the magnitudes or qualities of the items differ,” that is, the degree of diversity. A distribution is not adequately described by knowing the measure of central tendency alone. Absolute dispersions are expressed in the units the measurements are made, whereas relative dispersion is a pure number expressed as a ratio or percentage. Dispersion is also expressed by fluctuation, spread, scatter, or variation. The distributions A (blue curve) and B (red curve) shown in Fig. 7.1 are distinct though these are having the same central value. This distinction is due to the change in their degree of dispersion. Dispersion or scatter is more in the case of A (blue curve) than in the case of B (red curve). Therefore, it becomes necessary to find out a suitable measure of central tendency to describe the structure of the data adequately and appropriately. The range, quartile deviation, mean deviation, and standard deviation are various measures of dispersion. Various methods of computations of measures of dispersion have been dealt with in this chapter.

Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-981-13-0827-7_7

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9789811308277

DOI: 10.1007/978-981-13-0827-7_7

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Springer Books from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().