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College_girl's avatar

Standard deviation and mean?

Asked by College_girl (917points) October 29th, 2015
3 responses
“Great Question” (2points)

I have a question that says participants included 50 women (mean age=23, SD=1). Using the mean and standard deviation, describe the general organization of the ages of the 50 women.

My answer (although I’m not sure if correct) would be that out of the 50 women, most of the ages will be between 22–24, because the standard deviation (average distance from mean) is 1.

However, I don’t know what a potential limitation of this study would be. The SD is so small that it shouldn’t be do to outliers. Any thoughts?

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LuckyGuy's avatar

It is very handy to just memorize the 68 – 95 – 99.7 rule. It means 68% of the population is within +/-1 SD, 95% are within 2 SD and 99.7 are within 3 SD.

LuckyGuy's avatar

The 68 – 95 – 99.7 rule holds true if you have a normal gaussian distribution. That is a reasonable assumption for this problem.

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