Using the data on the “National Cancer Institute Data” Excel spreadsheet, calculate the descriptive statistics indicated below for each of the Race/Ethnicity groups.

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Excel can be programmed to use functions such as AVERAGE and MEDIAN for each race/ethnicity. This table displays the results.

The median, mode, and mean are all measures of central tendencies that show the most common value (the average), the middle value (the average), and the middle-most value within the data set. The Race/Ethnicity categories have similar means, which are in the 52-55 range. The median and mode are different, which suggests that there may be more extreme values within some of these groups, or the data distribution may not have been perfectly symmetrical.

Both variance and standard deviation describe the dispersion or spread of the data. The variance and the standard deviation in this example show the same degree of dispersion for each data point within the group. However, Native Americans have a larger standard deviation and variance. It is clear that Native Americans have a more distributed data set, and are less closely clustered about the average.

The range represents the distance between the minimum and maximum values of a dataset. This shows the degree of spread from the most extreme to the least extreme value. Range values show that the minimum and maximum values of each race/ethnicity are very different.

The descriptive statistics show that, in terms of health outcomes between groups of Race/Ethnicity, there may be some differences. Native American groups, for instance, show the greatest range, variance and standard deviation. These may reflect a more diverse health outcome within this group. These descriptive statistics need to be further investigated to see if they are linked to the health outcomes of individuals or other factors like socioeconomic status and access to healthcare.