What measures of central tendency dispersion or position hav

What measures of central tendency, dispersion, or position have you been reading about or listening to in the news today? For example, lately there have been numerous news reports on the mean price of gas or the median price of homes in a particular state, etc. Is the measure you discuss in your post being used correctly? Why or why not?

Solution

Many news reports only use the mean price when talking about prices, say gas.

As for the price of goods, they only report the \"range\" of prices. [Which is actually a confidence interval, not a single number like range.]

They never (or almost never) use standard deviation, or interquartile range, etc.

I think they are being used correctly, but in a vague way. They make it look like they have the population mean, when in fact, they just took a small sample. While they do not claim to have the population mean, they sound like they have.

As for the range, they are using this term in a different way. They use this term for an interval, instead of just one number, which is maximum - minimum value.