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Article: Standard Deviation
- Article from:
- International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences
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Standard Deviation
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The standard deviation is found throughout the behavioral and social science literature. It is the average spread among a set of scores around their mean, and it is the most frequently used measure of variability in parametric datasets. Researchers analyze their data by looking at the variability and breaking that variability down into its component parts.
When we describe any set of data we use three characteristics: (1) the form of the distribution, (2) the mean or central tendency, and (3) the variability. All three are required, since they are generally independent of each other. In other words, knowing the mean tells us nothing of the variability.
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