If the sample has an odd number of items in it then the median will definitely be in the sample at least once because the median is value of the set of data items whose value(s) are in the middle of the sample when the sample is sorted from smallest to largest.
If the sample has an even number of items in it then if the middle items are different the median will be their average, and it will differ from all of the items in the data set.
I could continue in this vein but already you can see that the median sometimes occurs in a data set but not always.
Chat with our AI personalities
The median shows where the 'middle' of your data is. For qualitative data, this only makes sense when the variable is ordinal. An ordinal variable is one whose values have a natural order, eg never/rarely/sometimes/often/always. If you have nominal data (qualitative data with no order) eg democratic/republican/other, you might find the mode (most common value) useful.
Not an extreme value.
No, they must have a median. However, if the data set is of even order, the median may not belong to the data set. For example, the median of 1,2,3,10 is halfway between 2 and 3 or 2.5 which is not a data point.
The median.
The median is used when reporting ordinal data.