Measures of Dispersion

Concept sheet | Mathematics
Table of contents

To get an overall picture of a distribution and not just a single data value, we can use the measures of dispersion.

Definition

Measures of dispersion are used to characterize the spread or scatter of values in a distribution. The more spread out the distribution is, the higher the value of the measure of dispersion.

No matter the measure of dispersion calculated, if the value gets increasingly large, then the data set becomes more and more dispersed.