What is the term for the amount by which a particular score differs from the mean of its set?

What is the term for the amount by which a particular score differs from the mean of its set?

• A. Deviation
• B. Central tendency
• C. Dispersion
• D. Frequency data

Answer: (A)

Deviation is the signed difference between a score and the mean. It tells you how far a value lies from the center and in which direction: above the mean is positive, below the mean is negative. This idea is the building block for dispersion measures like variance and standard deviation, which summarize overall spread by looking at these differences from the mean. The other terms describe different ideas: central tendency refers to a typical value in the data, dispersion to how spread out the data are, and frequency data to counts of how often each value occurs.

Deviation is the signed difference between a score and the mean. It tells you how far a value lies from the center and in which direction: above the mean is positive, below the mean is negative. This idea is the building block for dispersion measures like variance and standard deviation, which summarize overall spread by looking at these differences from the mean. The other terms describe different ideas: central tendency refers to a typical value in the data, dispersion to how spread out the data are, and frequency data to counts of how often each value occurs.