Question

A hospital evaluated the number of personnel on-site during a certain 50-day period during the 3 PM to 11 PM shift in the coronary unit. Table 2 shows several descriptive statistics for the data set.

mean	49.8
median	50.1
mode	51
standard deviation	4.3
variance	18.49
skewness	0.30
range	31

A) Review the mean and median. Notice that they are very close to one another. What does this tell us about the distribution of the data? Explain your answer.

B) Explain what the standard deviation of 4.3 tells us about the variability in the data.

C) Considering the information in the table, would you recommend using the interquartile range as a better measure to describe the data? Explain your answer.  

Answer 1

A) since meant and median are very close to each other. We can say that the data is normally distributed.

B)standard deviation is a measure of the average distance between the values of the data in the set and the mean. Thus standard deviation of 4.3 says that the data is spreading in between 4.3 units from mean.

C) yes interquartile range is a better measure to describe a data as it is not affected by outliers