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Section 3:
Means and Medians
Trial Award Patterns
Probability
Standard Deviation
Normal Distributions
Logarithms
Awards Test
 

Means and Medians

Definitions

The mean and median are familiar tools to help summarize central tendencies in quantitative data.

To calculate the mean one adds up the observed values and divides by the number of observations.

The median is the data point in the “middle” of the data. As many observations are greater than the median as are less than the median.

In a legal context, it is often of interest to know whether the means or medians of two groups of cases differ to a significant degree.


 
Copyright © 2002 by Theodore Eisenberg & Kevin M. Clermont
Cornell University
Cornell Law School
Cornell University
Comments to ted@teddy.law.cornell.edu
Last updated: September 2002