Question

You are a researcher working with hospitalization data which includes the 3 variables of age (e.g., 32, 24, 42), country of origin (e.g., United States, Peru, Italy) and socioeconomic status (measured as low, medium and high).

Which measures of variability would be appropriate to calculate for the variable of age?

Only the range

Only the interquartile range

Only the standard deviation

Only the interquartile range and the standard deviation

Only the standard deviation and the range

The range, the interquartile range and the standard deviation

The range, the interquartile range and the standard deviation are not appropriate to calculate for this variable

Answer 1

Age is a numerical variable, so Range could be easily computed as: Range = Max - Min

Standard deviation could also be computed using the sample mean and squaring the errors.

Similarly after finding the quartiles, the IQR can also be computed.

Note that for the other 2 variables, which are categorical, we cannot compute these parameters.

Therefore, Range, Interquartile range and standard deviation all could be computed for the variable Age as it is a numerical variable.