Hi,
One of my collegues is working on a report to provide feedback to a number of organisation that have provided data to us. One of these statistics collected was how many weeks did it take to fill a vacancy. In reporting this statistic back to the organisations my collegue asked whether she should use the mean or the median. The reply from her supervisor was "if the results are normally distributed then use the mean otherwise use the median". I am sure this is sage advice, but why? I would have thought that if the distribution was normally distributed then the mean and the median would be roughly similar figures since the normal curve has the frequency distributed around the mean. My further thinking about this was that for any distribution the mean will always be the upper bound of the median. Is this correct? . . ================================================================= Instructions for joining and leaving this list, remarks about the problem of INAPPROPRIATE MESSAGES, and archives are available at: . http://jse.stat.ncsu.edu/ . =================================================================
