Question

1. You are trying out a new behavioral therapy that is designed to lessen the severity of psychotic symptoms. When conducting a brief assessment of how well this therapy is working you create a distribution that has a mean of 53, a median of 62, and a standard deviation of 4. Is your distribution skewed? Positively or negatively?

Answer 1

Given:

Mean =53, Median (Md)=  62, Standard deviation (S)= 4.

Pearson’s Coefficient of Skewness=

= = -6.75

The skewness value of -6.75 shows the distribution is negatively skewed.

We can answer the question without calculating skewness also.

If the distribution of data is skewed to the left, the mean is less than the median. If the distribution of data is skewed to the right,  the median is less than the mean. In the current scenario, Mean(53) is less than Median(62). Therefre the distribution is left skewed or Negatively skewed distribution.