Research Misconceptions: Mean, Mode and Median

Research Misconceptions Student’s Name Institutional Affiliation Research Misconceptions When conducting a research project, the researchers describe the fundamental features of the data in the study through descriptive statistics. Every quantitative data measured and collected from samples during research is summarized, and graphical representations are created for analysis. This procedure is common in all quantitative data analysis. Descriptive analysis is used to elaborate what the data collected from the study reveals. In some cases, research might involve a large group of people. Thus, the incorporation of descriptive statistics enables researchers to simplify the data collected in a manageable manner. There are several misconceptions about descriptive statistics that often mislead researchers when analyzing their data. Such misconceptions hinder the researchers from making correct sense of their statistical information such as spread, center, and distribution (Bennett & Anway, 2003). This essay seeks to explain three misconceptions that associated with the descriptive analysis. The misconceptions are the mean is superior than the median and mode, the word ‘average’ is synonymous to the word ‘mean,’ and the only valid central tendency measures are mean, mode and median. The Mean is Superior than Mode and Median The most commonly used measures of central tendency are mean, mode and median. Although the mean is common among the three, it is not greater than median and mode. Whenever the values from observations are arranged in order, either descending or ascending, the median always occupies the middle position. This means that it equally divides the frequency distribution into two (Manikandan, 2011). Since the median is the middle number, it is more advantaged than the mean since it is not affected by outliers. In cases where the data collected has extreme values, the median is a better choice when calculating central tendency compared to mean. The mode is the most recurring value in the data. Some data do not have numbers that reoccur, and this makes it difficult to rely on the mode. However, in bi-modal distribution, mode is commonly used as the summary statistic. Nonetheless, in most cases, mean is regarded as the most appropriate measure of central tendency. There are some cases where median is better than mean. Such cases include when the values of some scores are undetermined, when data is measured on an ordinal scale, and when the distribution is open-ended. The mode is also regarded as the best measure when the data is taken on a nominal sc...