Final answer:
The term that refers to the statistics that examine the spread of different values around the mean is 'dispersion'.
Step-by-step explanation:
The statistics that examine the spread of different values around the measures of central tendency is known as dispersion.
Descriptive statistics are used to describe and summarize data, and one of their fundamental aspects is the measure of spread or variation. Standard deviation is commonly used to indicate how far the data values are from their mean, and hence, it's a prime measure of data spread. Other measures include the range, variance, and interquartile range.
While inferential statistics, known as statistical inference or inductive statistics, use sample data to estimate population parameters, descriptive statistics focus on summarizing and describing the data at hand. The standard deviation, as a part of descriptive statistics, gives a clear indication of how data points are spread out within a dataset. When a dataset has a bell-shaped and symmetric distribution, empirical rules involving the standard deviation become particularly helpful in understanding data distribution.