The Use of the Mean as a Measure of Central Tendency - Essay Example

The median’s advantage is that the extreme values do not affect the result as much as the mean. Moreover, there is only one answer and it is useful in comparing sets of data (Oswego City School District Regents Exam Prep Center, n.d.). The disadvantage of the median is that it is not very popular.
In the example given, the data is best represented by the mode which is $1. The mean may not be representative of the data because of an extreme value, $14 which will affect the result of the computation.

When one sees the word “average”, it is important that one check if there are any extreme values in the data set because this will show whether the “average” is really representative of the data.
If one is to ask a researcher for a mean, median or mode, one would request for the mean because, among the three measures of central tendency, one believes that it is the most reliable and usually representative of the data set. However, if there are extreme values, it would also be helpful to compute the median and mode.

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