MAT 126 Week 5 Discussion / Ashford

1. This Discussion will give you the opportunity to calculate or identify the three measures of central tendency. You will be asked to select an appropriate real life situation in which one measure would be more appropriate than the other two measures of center.

Select a topic of interest to you and record the topic in your posting, for example: “What is the average number of hours people watch TV every week?” Make sure the question you ask will be answered with a number, rather than answers with words.Write a hypothesis of what you expect your research to reveal. Example: Adults 21 years and over watch an average of 2.5 hours of TV per day.Sample at least fifteen people and record their data in a simple table or chart; study the examples from Section 12-3. You can gather your data at work, on the phone, or via some other method. This is your “Sampling Design.” Which of the four sampling techniques best describes your design?Explain in moderate detail the method you used to gather your data. In statistics this venture is called the “Methodology.”Make sure you break your sample into classes or groups, such as males/females, or ages, or time of day, etc.Calculate the mean, median, and mode for your data as a whole.Now calculate the mean, median, and mode of each of your classes or groups.

Indicate which measure of central tendency best describes your data and why. Then compare your results for each class or group, and point out any interesting results or unusual outcomes between the classes or groups. This is called a “comparative analysis” – using our results to explain interesting outcomes or differences (i.e., between men and women).