Is it possible to find the median of categorical data

After estimating the models, you would then use either depending on the observation. I don't know how much this makes sense, but it would be something simple I would try. Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes.

Improve this answer. The tricky bit is that this will likely not follow a simple standard distribution - many may work the typical national working hours per week? Jeremy Miles Jeremy Miles Yes, as you've shown. Depends on what you mean. It's an estimate, and estimates can be biased. Sign up or log in Sign up using Google. Sign up using Facebook. Sign up using Email and Password. Post as a guest Name. Email Required, but never shown. What is his median time now?

The median is the mean between the data point of rank. For larger data sets, the cumulative relative frequency distribution can be helpful to identify the median.

Imagine you ask the 30 students of your class how many people there are in their households. You summarize the data you collected in a frequency table, in which you include the relative frequencies and the cumulative relative frequencies.

This is even more obvious if you visualize the cumulative relative frequency on a bar chart like on chart 4. Therefore, it is important to check if the data set includes extreme values before choosing a measure of central tendency. This will be illustrated by the next example. What kinds of data are properly displayed in a bar chart or pie chart?

What are the imortant characteristics of a pie chart? How many runners took at least 30 min to finish the race? Question f78b3. Which chart type do you use to compare distinct objects over time using horizontal bars? However, there are a range of cases where it is useful to calculate an average value based on the categories. This requires that each category in the data be associated with a meaningful value, so that the average is also meaningful.

In this article we consider cases which feature prominently in survey research. The first is the rating scale or Likert scale which has a natural numeric sequence associated with it, owing to the ordered nature of the categories.

The second example is the case where a survey question asks the respondent to choose a range of values to which they belong, like age groups or income brackets. While these scale categories are useful when showing response percentages for each scale category, often, it is much more practical to show an average overall rating.

The average rating provides a single metric which is more easily interpreted than trying to interpret the response percentages for each individual scale category. For scale questions, the key to calculating an average is to program the survey with meaningful values coded to each individual scale category. The results for this question can easily be averaged.

The closer the overall average is to 5, the higher the level of satisfaction. Using the average also allows for easy crosstab comparison of sub-groups. Different scales can be used as well depending.