Introduction

Dispersion is statistical measure which gives information about the extent of the scatteredness or variation of various items of a series from their mean value.

It gives information about the composition of series and facilitates the comparison of variability of two series. It helps in finding average variation of values of items from mean value of data It helps in determining the variability of mean.

Various statistical measures like Skewness, Kurtosis, etc. can be calculated with the help of dispersion which helps in studying further characteristics of the data.

Different Measures of dispersion are :

Range Quartile Deviation Mean Deviation

Standard Deviation
Range and Quartile deviations measures are location devices whereas Mean deviation and Standard deviation are measures of calculation.

Range:
The difference of the largest and the smallest item of a series is Range. Range = Largest value Smallest value Coefficient of Range = (L - S) / (L + S)

PARTITION VALUES
Median divides a statistical series into two equal parts. Like Median there are other partition values which divides a series into four, ten and hundred equal parts.

Partition values dividing a series into four equal parts are known as Quartile, partition which divides series into ten equal parts are called Deciles and those divides series into hundred equal parts are known as Percentiles.

Quartile: There are three quartiles

Q1 divides the distribution in such a way that th of items lie below it and th above it. Q2 divides the distribution into approximately two halves i.e. 50% items below it and 50% above it. (Q2= Median) Q3 divides the distribution in such a way that 3/4th of items lie below it and 1/4th lie above it. In symmetrical distribution, the curve is bell shaped and Q1 and Q2 are equi-distant from the median which lies in the centre..

Deciles: There are nine deciles denoted by D1, D2, D3, D4, D5, D6, D7,D8 and D9 The fifth decile D5 is equal to Median or Q2

Percentile: There are ninety-nine percentiles which are denoted by P1, P2, , P99

Quartile Deviation
Quartile deviation is also called semi Inter- Quartile

Range
Q.D. = (Q3 Q1) / 2 m for Q3= 3(N+1)/4 th place item in the series m for Q1= (N+1)/4 th place item in the series Q1 = L1 + (L1 + L2)/f X (m-c) Q2 = L1 + (L1 + L2)/f X (m-c) Coefficient of Q.D. = (Q3 Q1) / (Q3 + Q1)

Mean Deviation:
The Arithmetic mean of the deviations of all the values taken from some statistical average (mean, median, mode) of the series is known as Mean Deviation or Average deviation.

| D| M .D. N
For Discrete Series

For ungrouped Data

For grouped Data

fi | D | M .D. fi
Where xi are the mid-pt. of class- interval

fi | D | M .D. fi
Where xi are individual observations

Calculation of Mean Deviation 1. Calculate the statistical average to be used ( Mean, Mode, Median) 2. Calculate Deviation of all the values of series from average used. 3. Sum of deviation divided by N

Relative Measure of Mean Deviation Coefficient of Mean Deviation

M .D Coeffi M .D Avg used

Average used = Mean, Mode or Median

 Standard deviation
score 8 25 7 5 8 3 10 12 9 mean deviation* 9.67 - 1.67 9.67 +15.33 9.67 - 2.67 9.67 - 4.67 9.67 - 1.67 9.67 - 6.67 9.67 + .33 9.67 + 2.33 9.67 - .67 sum of squared dev= squared deviation 2.79 235.01 7.13 21.81 2.79 44.49 .11 5.43 .45 320.01

Standard Deviation = = = =

Square root(sum of squared deviations / (N-1) Square root(320.01/(9-1)) Square root(40) 6.32

 Variability provides a quantitative measure

of the degree to which scores in a distribution are spread out or clustered together.

 The larger the standard deviation figure, the wider the

range of distribution away from the measure of central tendency

Standard Deviation

 Deviation: deviation of one score from the mean

Variance: Square of deviation( from mean, mode or

median) is variance.

Standard Deviation:
The positive square root of variance is called Standard deviation
S.D.= Sqrt(Variance)

Uses of Standard Deviation

S.D. enables us to determine as to how far individual items in a distribution deviate from its mean. In a symmetrical , bell shaped curve such as one below

Relative Dispersion: Coefficient Of Variation

Cof . var

X (100 )

Coefficient of variance is used for comparing two different groups of data.

Skewness
When the median, mean and mode do not have same value in a distribution, then it is known as skewed distribution. Skewness indicate lack of symmetry. When the frequency distribution is elongated to right, it is , having a longer tail to right and is said to be positively skewed. In contrast, if distribution has a longer tail to the left, it is said to be negatively skewed.

Skewness

Positively Skewed (Skewed to Right)

Negatively Skewed (Skewed to Left)

Mean > Median> Mode

Mode > Median> Mean

The main difference between skewness and dispersion is that

skewness measures the magnitude as well as direction of variation in the data whereas dispersion only measures the magnitude of variation

Relative Measure of skewness

Karl Pearsons Measure : Skewness = Mean Mode Coefficient of skewness = (Mean Mode)/ S.D.

When we are unable to calculate mode, Coefficient of skewness = 3(Mean Median)/ S.D.

The difference between mean and mode indicates the extent of departure from symmetry.

Kurtosis

Kurtosis measures the degree of peakedness of a frequency distribution