Introduction to Measures of Dispersion

Measures of Dispersion

The central tendency is not the only interesting or useful information about a data set. The two data sets illustrated below have the same mean (\(\text{0}\)), but have different spreads around the mean. Each circle represents one value from the data set (or one datum).

Dispersion is a general term for different statistics that describe how values are distributed around the centre. In this section, we will look at measures of dispersion.