Measures of Dispersion

Dr. Poonam Kaushal

Assistant Professor
ICFAI Business School
 Definition
Measures of dispersion are descriptive statistics that describe
how similar a set of scores are to each other
The more similar the scores are to each other, the lower the
measure of dispersion will be
The less similar the scores are to each other, the higher the
measure of dispersion will be
In general, the more spread out a distribution is, the larger the
measure of dispersion will be

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 Measures of Dispersion
Which of the distributions of scores has the larger
dispersion? 125
100
75
The upper distribution has 50
25
more dispersion because 0
the scores are more spread 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
out 125
100
75
50
That is, they are less 25
similar to each other 0
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
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 Measures of Dispersion
There are three main measures of dispersion:

The range
Quartile Deviation
Variance / standard deviation

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 The Range
The range is defined as the difference between the largest
score in the set of data and the smallest score in the set of
data, XL – XS

What is the range of the following data:

4 8 1 6 6 2 9 3 6 9

The largest score (XL) is 9; the smallest score (XS) is 1; the

range is XL - XS = 9 - 1 = 8
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 When To Use the Range
The range is used when
you have ordinal data or
you are presenting your results to people with little or
no knowledge of statistics

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Quartiles in Statistics

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Quartiles Examples

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Interquartile range

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 Interquartile range
The primary use of the IQR is to represent
the spread difference between the upper and
lower quartiles of a data set. This can be
used as an indicator for variability of the
dataset.

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 Quartile Deviation
Quartile deviation is defined as half of the distance between the
third and the first quartile.

It is also called Semi Interquartile range. If Q1 is the first

quartile and Q3 is the third quartile, then the formula for
deviation is given by;
Quartile deviation = (Q3-Q1)/2

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 SIR Example
What is the SIR for the data to 2
the right?
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25 % of the scores are below 5  5 = 25th %tile
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5 is the first quartile
25 % of the scores are above 25
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25 is the third quartile 10
SIR = (Q3 - Q1) / 2 = (25 - 5) / 2 = 12
10 14
20
 25 = 75th %tile
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HOME-WORK

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Interquartile Range

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 Solution:
The first ten prime numbers are:
2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29

Here the number of values = 10

Therefore, the median is mean of 11 and 13
That is Q2 = (11 + 13)/2 = 24/2 = 12.

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Quartile Deviation

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 Solution
 Q2 = 12
 Q1= 7.5
 Q3 =21

Quartile déviation = (Q3 – Q1)/2

= (21 – 7.5)/2
= 13.5/2
= 6.75 26
Quartile Deviation for Grouped Data

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Quartile Deviation

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.

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quartile déviation = (Q3 – Q1)/2
QD = (82.5 – 34.167)/2
= 48.333/2
= 24.1665

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