What Can You Do with Measures of Central Tendency and Dispersion 

1. Describe a variable's distribution, which enables you to describe how a group of people act, think, feel, etc..  

2. Determine whether a sample represents a population.

3.  With the mean and a standard deviation we can graph a variable's distribution without knowing all the data points.

4.  Provide baseline data.

5. We can use central tendency and dispersion to determine if a variable's distribution approximates a normal distribution and if we can, thus, calculate various inferential statistics, which assume a normal distribution, on that variable. If not, we may be able to transform them into a normal approximation.

6. Univariate analyses guide inferential analyses:

• Determines where to focus inferential analysis.

• Determines what type of inferential analysis to do.