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Employment Data Listed below are results from the National Health and Nutrition

ID: 3170519 • Letter: E

Question

Employment Data Listed below are results from the National Health and Nutrition Examination. These results indicate the working status of the person being surveyed, and the listed values represent these responses: 1 = Working; 2 = With a job but not at work; 3 = Looking for work; 4 = Not working; 7 = Refused to answer; 9 = Don't know. Does it make sense to calculate the mean of these numbers? Why or why not? Median In an editorial, the Poughkeepsie Journal printed this statement: "The median price - the price exactly in between the highest and lowest -.. ." Does that statement correctly describe the median? Why or why not?

Explanation / Answer

Employment Data

Answer NO

Justification

Employment status of a person is an attribute. By assigning a number to each status we are only codifying it and not quantifying. Average does not make any sense for an attribute data which cannot be quantified.

As an additional input, for attribute data, a meaningful measure would be number of persons of a particular status or still better, the percentage of persons in a particular status.

Median

Answer again is No

Median is the middle value of an ORDERED set of values. So, unless the data is in ascending order or descending order of values, median cannot be 'exactly between lowest and highest price'

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