ABSTRACT
This chapter helps the readers to understand concept of measure of dispersion. It introduces the second category of descriptive statistics: measures of dispersion or variability. The chapter also helps the readers to understand the meaning, calculation, and interpretation of range, standard deviation, and variance using Excel. The range is the simplest measure of dispersion. A higher range implies higher variation or spreads in the data. Standard deviation is the square root of the sum of all the squared deviations of the observations from their mean divided by the number of observations in the dataset. One measure of descriptive statistics, ‘kurtosis’ defines the shape of a distribution’s tail in relation to or in comparison with the normal distribution. The value of kurtosis is always compared to that of a normal distribution. There are the following three categories of Kurtosis: mesokurtic, leptokurtic, and platykurtic.
