Week 3 Assignment: Central Tendency and Variability

I use the Afrobarometer data for this assignment. The screenshot of the data is
shown in Figure 1. The two variables selected are Lived Poverty Index (LPI) and
employment status. LPI is the continuous variable while employment status is a
categorical variable.

Figure 1: Afrobarometer data

Lived Poverty Index

The descriptive statistics in Table 1 show a number of central tendency and
variability measures for LPI. There are 50,923 valid cases for this variable and 664
cases are missing. The mean (or the average LPI) is 1.245, the median LPI is 1.2 and
the mode (most frequently occurring index) is 0.0. The index is positively skewed as
shown by the skewness value of 0.419. The LPI is also peaked as shown by the
kurtosis of -0.642. The LPI has a range of 4 and starts from a low of 0 to a high of 4.
The histogram (see Figure 2) is a graphical representation of LPI showing the
distribution of LPI across the scale.
Employment status
Table 2 shows the descriptive statistics for employment status. This is a frequency
table that shows that 66.8% of the respondents were unemployed and only 33.2%
were employed. Since no other measures of central tendency or dispersion can be

used to describe this data, the chart in Figure 3 shows the bar chart for the data. As
shown, about 34,000 respondents were unemployed while 17,000 were employed.
This means that the unemployed were double the number of employed respondents
in the survey.
Table 1: Summary descriptive statistics for LPI

Lived Poverty Index (average index of 5 poverty items)

N
Valid
Missing
Mean
Median
Mode
Std. Deviation
Skewness
Std. Error of Skewness
Kurtosis
Std. Error of Kurtosis
Range
Minimum
Maximum

Figure 2: Histogram of LPI

50923
664
1.245
1.200
.0
.9456
.418
.011
-.642
.022
4.0
.0
4.0

Table 2: Employment status frequency table

Valid

Missing
Total

Unemployed
Employed
Total
System

Frequency Percent
34326
66.5
17052
33.1
51378
99.6
209
.4
51587
100.0

Figure 3: Employment status bar chart

Valid Percent
66.8
33.2
100.0

Cumulative Percent
66.8
100.0