First of all, an example; mean age of the children in a test is 12.93, with a standard deviation of .76.
Now, maybe I am just over thinking this, but everything I Google gives me this big convoluted explanation of what standard deviation is without addressing the kiddy pool I’m standing in.
Edit: you guys have been fantastic! This has all helped tremendously, if I could hug you all I would.
In: Mathematics
My explanation might be rudimentary but the eli5 answer is:
Mean of (0,1, 99,100) is 50
Mean of (50,50,50,50) is also 50
But you can probably see that for the first data, the mean of 50 would not be of as importance, unless we also add some information about how much do the actual data points ‘deviate’ from the mean.
Standard deviation is intuitively the measure of how ‘scattered’ the actual data is about the mean value.
So the first dataset would have a large SD (cuz all values are very far from 50) and the second dataset literally has 0 SD
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