Question

Describe when you believe it is appropriate to use the following terms in developing data reports for a healthcare organization: mean, median and mode. Why?

Answer 1

The mean value of numerical data is without a doubt the most commonly used statistical measure. Anyone who has a basic statistical background knows how to calculate the (arithmetic) mean – just sum up the individual values and divide the result by the number of values.

If, e.g., we talk about the average age of a group of people, we always refer to the mean of the individual age values. So there is also a general sense of understanding of this measure. The mean age can be interpreted as a single “representative” value describing the location of the age values of the people in this group. Therefore, in statistical language the mean is called a “location parameter”.

Sometimes the median is used as an alternative to the mean. Just like the mean value, the median also represents the location of a set of numerical data by means of a single number. Roughly speaking, the median is the value that splits the individual data into two halves: the (approximately) 50% largest and 50% lowest data in the collective.

If we find a data is skewed towards left or right or in other words , the data is not appropriately symmetric Then we can use median instead of mean. There is a another scenario, suppose a outlier is present into a data which is highly influence the mean value of the data , but not so much affects to the median value. This is also a situation where we can apply median.

Now , For discussing about mode , I would like to present a example through which I explain the concept of mode and the appropriate situation for applying mode.

In a shoe shop , The shop kipper wants a estimate, how much he needs to stock shoes of different size in his shop. Generally shoe size from 5-8 are mostly sold and below 5 , above 8 sized shoe are sold less respectively.

So , according to the demand of different size of shoes , the shopkeeper stocks the shoes.

He can apply the concept of mode , which is the most frequently obtained number in a data set.

So if in the data set , there are so many values lies in a interval or a distinct value obtain several times in a data set , we take this value as a mode.

All these three measures are based on the concept of Central tendency. We use these measures for different situations for comparing with other groups of data or different measure of statistical tools.

So in health care organisation ,

we can measure the mean age of patient of different diseases. We can use the concept in drugs related experiment.