Frequency tables
- A frequency table measures the number of times a behaviour/action/phenomenon occurs, e.g.
- the number of times litter is dropped
- the number of times red is chosen for a T-shirt design
- the number of goals scored by players in one season
- To organise and make sense of frequency data a researcher will arrange it into a frequency table:
Score: Number of goals scored in one match by school team in one season |
Tally |
Frequency |
1 |
|
1 |
2 |
|
3 |
3 |
11 |
|
4 |
20 |
|
5 |
8 |
- The frequency table above reveals that the mode for goals scored is 4 as this happened 20 times in one season
- The median score is 5 as this sits in the middle of the ordered data set i.e. frequency of 8
- The mean score is calculated as follows:
- Multiply each score by its frequency e.g. 1 x 1, 2 x 3 etc.
- Add the total of these scores, in this case, it is 1 + 6 + 33 + 80 + 40 = 160
- Divide this score by the total number of goals in the first column (10) to find the mean, in this case it is 10.6
- The range is calculated by subtracting the lowest score from the highest score, in this case, it is 5 - 1 = 4