Measures of SpreadΒΆ
Central tendency measures tell an incomplete story about our data; we need to know how values fall around the center and how far apart they are. Measures of spread tell us how the data is dispersed; this will indicate how thin (low dispersion) or wide (very spread out) our distribution is. As with measures of central tendency, we have several ways to describe the spread of a data set, and which one we choose will depend on the situation and the data.