wHEN DO YOU USE THE MEAN, MEDIAN AND MODE?

Answer 1

Do you have a specific problem in mind, or are you just asking what situations would dictate mean versus median?

All three of these measures are a way of summarizing a number of observations.....a way of understanding where the "middle" of the distribution is. If the data are distributed with a Normal distribution, it turns out that all three are equivalent.

In general, mean or average is used the most often. It's easy to calculate and people understand its meaning.

However, median is usually more meaningful. For example, suppose that you were trying to calculate the income for a typical group of people. Suppose that the group consisted of 10 people like me, and one Bill Gates.

If you take the mean, you are giving Bill the same weight as me. That might not make sense, since he is a HUGE outlier -- very unusual.

The median income would treat him as less important given that he is an outlier. The median income would represent someone like me rather than the mean which would be skewed toward Bill.

Answer 2

If the distribution is normal they are equal to each other so it doesn't matter which you use. However for economic variables distributions are generally not normal, and the mode

Answer 3

when their asked for the question should indicate remember that mean can also be called average

if your question wasn't clear and you meant to ask what to do then
mean add them all up and devide by how many you have
median easiest way is to put them all in order form lowest to highest and then cross of one frome each end untill you get down to one or two if it's two take the average of thoes two
and mode is the number that occures most often