Response to Michael’s Post on Descriptive Analysis for Continuous Variable
Hello, Michael Maloney
Your post precisely shows the measures of central tendency as well as standard deviation and variance for your selected continuous variable. These descriptive statistics are very essential in making interpretations of the data and giving valuable information about the family income that you have chosen as your continuous variable. Your explanation of what the mean, mode, median, standard deviation, and variance for this variable implies as well as your notion that the best measure of central tendency would depend on what one is trying to obtain from the data is appropriate. However, I would suggest that you add the fact that a high standard deviation as depicted in the statistics implies that there are data values, which are far away from the mean. This would mean that some families’ earnings are far below the mean, while others are higher above it. I think it is also important to infer from the histogram that the last bar on the right depicts the outliers in the income of the families, which have led to the high variance value. I find your choice of the research question very clever and well thought of.
I believe that you made a wonderful choice of the categorical variable. With the use of percentages and a pie chart, one is able to clearly see the proportion of the races that participated in the research. However, I think it would be good to consider the average income of each race. This will help one answer the research question of whether there are significant differences in incomes of people of different races. Putting such information on a pie chart as you have done will give a clear picture of whether a certain race is more privileged than the others in terms of income. Other than those few suggestions, I feel that you have a very well researched and written post.