in this video i’ll tell you how to summarize the distribution of a continuous variable continuous distributions can be described using measures of central tendency and measures of dispersion central tendency measures give you an idea of what a typical observation looks like dispersion measures ask how spread out the values are to get either set of measures we use the command sum which is short for summarize when we think of averages we generally Central Tendency Measures think of means that’s the sum of all scores divided by the number of respondents whose scores are summed the median is the middle value fifty percent of a sample will score above the median and fifty percent below the mode refers to the most common answer in general we don’t use modes that much when describing continuous variables dispersion measures give us an idea of the spread of values by spread i mean how often are observations score close to or well away from typical measurements a common measure of dispersion is the standard deviation this measure captures the average departure from the sample mean either above or below when the deviation is higher then our observations tend to be further away from the mean when it’s lower then our observations are closely clustered around the mean to get these measures we use the sum Command command which is short for summarize the syntax is sum space and the variable name comma space detail for example if i want to summarize a variable called income i would enter sum space income comma detail the detail option asks data to deliver a wider array of summary statistics if you don’t use detail you’ll get a more limited number of distribution summary statistics the detail option is useful when you want to look at one variable at a time i tend not to use the distribution when i want stata to summarize multiple variables at once let’s see what it looks like to use the sum command in a real stata session i’m going to summarize the sei variable which shows people’s socioeconomic index score on a scale of zero to one hundred i type sum sei common detail that’s the mean of the sample and the standard deviation this part gives us the different scores at the samples percentiles the median is 41.2 28.4 is the 10th percentile score 78.5 is the 90th let’s review Review to get a summary of a continuous variables distribution we use the sum command the syntax is sum space the variable name comma space detail for more help on this command type help sum in the state stated command window