Measures of Central Tendency

Measures of central tendency are meant to describe what is typical for cases.  For example, if you look at 500 different television ads and you want to describe how long a typical ad runs on television, you would use a measure of central tendency.  There are many measures of central tendency but the three most commonly used are the mean, median, and mode.  Which measure you use depends on the type of data you are trying to describe.

• Mode

• Median

• Mean