Question

in 2-3 sentences explain the answer like a twelve-year-old
Which measure of variability—range or IQR—best describes the spread of the dataset?

For a statistics assignment, Shayna randomly surveyed students on how many hours per week they spend playing online games:

1.0 1.0 2.0 6.5 10.0 10.0 10.0 10.0 12.0 12.5 14.0 14.0 14.0 14.0 15.0 15.0 15.5 16.0 17.5 18.0

IQR; the distribution is skewed, and there are outliers in the dataset.

Answer 1

The Interquartile Range (IQR) is a better measure of variability for this dataset because the range would be greatly influenced by a few extreme values (outliers). The IQR looks at the middle 50% of the data, so it gives a better idea of the spread without being affected as much by those outliers.