Abstract
This chapter focuses on the measurement of dispersion. In describing or talking about a distribution, it is necessary to know the way in which the observed scores are dispersed about the mean. The simplest index of dispersion is called the range. The most commonly used indicator of dispersion is the standard deviation, usually denoted as S.D., or σ, which is a kind of average of all deviations about the mean of a sample. The standard deviation is the square root of the variance. In the normal or Gaussian distribution, all three measures of central tendency—the mean, the mode, and the median—fall exactly at the same point.
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