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Dictionary definition: central tendency
- Article from:
- Dictionary of the Social Sciences
- Author:
Copyright© Dictionary of the Social Sciences 2002, originally published by Oxford University Press 2002. (Hide copyright information)
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central tendency
Refers to the average or middle value in a data set or distribution. There are a number of related measures of the central tendency, which may be more or less appropriate to different data sets; these include the mean, the median, and the mode. The
mean
(or average) is calculated by adding all the values and dividing by the number of values. The
median
is the middle value in a distribution ...