Question

 

 

What would be the best way of summarizing the ages of a given group of patients if you had the actual age values themselves?

If you only collected age information using age categories or ranges would this change your answer? What would be the best way of summarizing this information?

1.  

Answer 1

a) The best way to summarise the given data would be to find the median of the observation. Mean can be greatly influenced by the influential outliers and doesn't always give you the central value and the mode can also be misleading measurement of central tendency in a lot of the cases. But, median are least affected by the outliers and thus always gives the approx. central value of the data.

b) Collecting the data in intervals or categories is preferred over computing mean, median, or mode since it can give a clear picture about the variability of the data in addition to the central value. It can be graphically represented in histograms which givea a clear idea about the distribution of the data.

c) The best way to summarise the above data would be to find the frequencies in the different appropriate intervals. In other words, the above data can be considered as categorical data in a sense. It would be more convenient and easy to summarise and convey the data in different categories.