Question

How do you know whether to use mean or median when analyzing a one variable data set (box & whisker plot, histogram)... I looked it up and it said to use median if its skewed right or left and mean if its symmetric, but my math teacher said something else... what do you guys think?

Answer 1

Usually, If the data is normally distributed the mean is good to use. If not,
ex( similar distribution), you could use the median.

Answer 2

Median is generally good if you have outliers (data points that are very far off from the majority of the points).

Mean can be used otherwise.