ABSTRACT
Central tendency is very useful in the social sciences. It allows the researcher to know what the average for a data set is. It also summarizes the data into one quantitative value, which can be used to represent the entire data set. There are three main measures of central tendency: the mean, the median, and the mode. This chapter looks at these three measures of central tendency and explores how to calculate them and understand the conditions under which they are most appropriate to be used. In general, the arithmetic mean is the preferred statistic for representing central tendency. This preference is based on a number of properties it possesses. First, the concept of 'deviation from the mean' gives rise to two of its most important properties, that is, the sum of the deviation scores from the mean is zero, and the sum of the squared deviation scores from the mean is a minimum.
