Quantitative Methods - Unit 1 > Measures of Spread
 
 

Standard Deviation
 

This is probably the most commonly used measure of spread for comparing distributions.

Standard deviation gives a measure of how much the values in the distribution deviate from the mean.

  • A larger standard deviation means a larger spread.
  • A smaller standard deviation means a smaller spread.

We are going to use the following version of the formula to calculate standard deviation.

Standard Deviation formula: Square root of Sigma fx squared divided by sigma f minus sigma fx divided by sigma f all squared