if you are asked to find the average income of eveyone working in a company, from the president of the company to the janitor, which form of central tendancy would be best to use the mean or median?
2006-10-16 11:57:26 · 5 answers · asked by Ern Bucket 2 in Education & Reference ➔ Homework Help
This is a classic statistics question, and obviously one some of the other people answering this haven't ever encountered. The correct answer is median. The reason is that the boss's salary is almost certainly an outlier--much higher than that of everyone else who works for the company. That one extremely high salary will skew the mean, making it seem unusually high.
For the exact same reason, the government uses median for most of its statistics. They wouldn't want to report "average income" and have Bill Gates' salary make it seem as if everyone in the country was rich.
2006-10-16 12:22:38 · answer #1 · answered by dmb 5 · 0⤊ 0⤋
The word average means mean.
But the best indicator of central tendancy for income is the median, that way extremely large incomes won't sway one's impression the wrong way.
2006-10-16 19:12:50 · answer #2 · answered by Anonymous · 0⤊ 0⤋
first you would make a line with each different wage for each level of employments. then you would place the number of how many people that made that wage under the wage amount. then you could see which group made the most and the second most then average the two by adding them together then dividing by two. wha la ===the answer
2006-10-16 19:06:25 · answer #3 · answered by emily h 1 · 0⤊ 0⤋
add all of the workers income and divide by the amount of workers. this will take a long time, but it will give you the exact average of income for the company.
2006-10-16 19:02:37 · answer #4 · answered by Dan P 3 · 0⤊ 0⤋
to answer your question, yes, I would say that is a math problem
2006-10-16 19:01:01 · answer #5 · answered by Anonymous · 0⤊ 1⤋