Oxford Dictionary of Sociology | variation (statistical)
variation (statistical) The greater part of empirical research is concerned with the characteristics of groups, or aggregate social entities, rather than individual cases; that is, with men or women in general, rather than any particular man or woman. A range of statistical measures of association are employed to describe the features of groups, or types of case in the aggregate. Most of them are based on the normal distribution, the binomial distribution, or the Poisson distribution, from which a number of statistical summary measures are derived. The mean, mode, and median provide measures of central tendency, the most common or typical value in the distribution, which coincide when the distribution is normal. Measures of dispersion attempt to concentrate information about the general pattern in single summary statistics. These include the range, mean...
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