STANDARD DEVIATION AND VARIANCE

FRANCIS IAN L. OFENDOREYES, RN

A measure of the average deviation or departure of the individual scores from the mean

the average of the squared differences from the Mean.

Variance is a measure of "relative to the mean, how far away does the other data fall" - it is a measure of dispersion. a high variance would indicate that your data is very much spread out over a large area (random) , whereas a low variance would indicate that all our data is very similar. Standard deviation (the square root of a variance) is a measure of "on average, how far away does the data fall from the mean". it can be interpreted in a similar way to the variance, but since it is square rotted, it is less susceptible to outliers

10

8
8 8 8

6
6 6 6

9
9 9 9

7
7 7 7

10
10 10 10

5
5 5 5

x 10 9 8 7 6 5

f 5 5 5 5 5 5 n=30

xf 50 45 40 35 30 25 xf=225

x2 100 81 64 49 36 25

x 2f 500 405 320 245 180 125 x2f = 1775