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.
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.
yes
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.
the median and mode are but the mean is not
One disadvantage of using the median is that it may not accurately represent the entire dataset if there are extreme outliers present, as the median is not influenced by the magnitude of these outliers. Additionally, the median may not be as intuitive to interpret as the mean for some individuals, as it does not provide a direct measure of the total value of the dataset. Finally, calculating the median can be more computationally intensive compared to other measures of central tendency, especially with large datasets.
it messes up the mean and sometimes the median. * * * * * An outlier cannot mess up the median.
Yes, the median is always a number. For qualitative data, use the mode for a measure of center.
No.
No, not always. Median is the number that's in the middle of a group of numerical data. Mean is just the average of a set of numbers, which isn't always in the middle.
yes* * * * *No. If you have a small, even number of observations, the median is the average of the two middle values. This will usually NOT be part of the data set.
Not an extreme value.
No, it is not necessarily true that the median is always one of the data points in a set of data. The median is found by arranging the data in numerical order and selecting the middle value. This value might be one of the data points, but it could also be the average of two data points if there is an even number of values in the set.
The median in a set of data, would be the middle item of the data string... such as: 1,2,3,4,5,6,7 the Median of this set of data would be: 4