Chapter 2: Measures of central tendency or location

It is that value around which a majority of the data will tend to concentrate and hence it acts
as a representative of the whole data.

The important measures of central tendency are:

(i) Arithmetic Mean: This is also called as simple average and is obtained by the sum of all
the values divided by the number of values.

If X is a variable having values x1, x2, x3 ,…xn then the arithmetic mean X bar = ∑ X / n

For example, if there are 5 values 12, 15, 14, 16 and 18 then arithmetic mean = (12 + 15 +
14+ 16+ 18)/ 5 = 75/5 = 15.

If the values are repeating i.e. if frequencies are given then it can be shown as

X f fx

2 3 6

4 2 8

6 5 30

X bar = ∑ fx/∑f = 44/10 = 4.4

For class interval data, we first find the mid-points of each class and multiply these with the
frequencies. The arithmetic mean can be calculated as

Class f m fm

0-10 5 5 25

10-20 2 15 30

20-30 3 25 75