[ Introduction |
Salary by Major |
Salary by Occupation |
Comments ]
Helpful Hints
This helpfile is under construction, and isn't very useful yet.
Using appropriate caution when interpreting average salary numbers
Mean vs. Median
When picking a measure of what the "average" or typical worker earns (
central limit tendency), statisticians generally have two choices: the
mean or the median.
Computed much like your GPA, the mean is just the average; It is computed
by summing up all the numbers in the data set, and dividing by the number
of observations.
The median is the number at which 50% of the observations lie below, and
50% of the observations lie above.
For this study, we have chosen to use to median rather than the mean, due
to the fact that the median is less influenced by here for a numerical example.
Be careful when the number of observations is small
Issues for interpreting the percentage of majors
Interpreting the occupational descriptions
Interpreting the field descriptions
What is a histogram?
Prepared by Marlin Koch and Prof. Ken Chapman: vcecn00a@csun.edu