The median is a measure of central tendency that represents the middle value in a data set when it is ordered from least to greatest. Unlike the mean, which can be heavily influenced by outliers, the median provides a more robust indicator of the central location of data, especially in skewed distributions (Smith, 2020). To find the median, one must first arrange the data in numerical order. If the number of observations is odd, the median is the middle number. If even, it is the average of the two middle numbers (Johnson & Lee, 2019). This characteristic makes the median particularly useful in fields such as economics and social sciences, where data may not always be symmetrically distributed (Brown et al., 2021).
References
Brown, A., Clark, B., & Davis, C. (2021). Statistics for social sciences. Academic Press.
Johnson, R., & Lee, S. (2019). Introduction to statistical methods. Wiley.Smith, J. (2020).
Understanding measures of central tendency. Journal of Applied Statistics, 45(3), 234-245.