Finding central tendency to a survey-what am I missing?

Factual Questions
1

I’m trying to finish a paper for school, but something went wrong. Maybe.
My professor is walking me through some of this, but, I don’t want to call her. I want to finish it this weekend, w/o her help.
So, my problem: The operative section of my research design says that 'the mean and the median will be recorded to find the central tendency."
OK. I know what the phrases mean, and I know how to find them.
But, I’m wondering how to apply them. I am using a Likert-type scale, with 6 responses, from ‘Never’ to ‘Always’. I have 68 people in the survey, and scores, respectively, of 10, 16, 22, 4, 14, 2. So, I put them in an XL spreadsheet, punched in the formula for mean, and I got 11.3333. 68 responses divided by Which, irrespective of how they answered, will always be 11.333333… Since all of the questions were answered, I can easily guess that the median will be, what, 3?
I’m not measuring the right info here, to find the central tendency, but the clear (read: easy) answer is eluding me. Can you help? Should I have applied a value to each of the responses, multiplied hits per response times that value, and divided by same? If so, would my mean, just pulling a number from thin air, say 3.67, mean that the mean of the responses was 2/3 way between the 3rd and 4th response?

I have very limited statistical skills: just took one semester which was in preparation for this class, but the study is extremely low level, and once I find the central tendency, that’s about it. Did I screw up? Is there some other measure that I should be looking for to find the central tendency?
:confused:
Thanks,
hh

2

Yeah just turn the data back to 68 responses ranked 1 to 6 and work out the mean and median. Both of these are just examples of several things that can be used to indicate central tendency, such as mode or midrange or weighted mean etc.

Both will be close to 3.

3

What variable do you want the central tendency (i.e. mean and median) of?

I get the impression that the variable is the impression people give, on a scale of 1 to 6. So you would have 68 data values, each of which is somewhere from 1 to 6, and their mean and median both should be somewhere between 1 and 6.

Are your numbers 10, 16, etc. frequencies for each of the values?

4

In case I wasn’t clear, your summary tells you that you have 10 1s, 16 2s, 22 3s etc.

5

don’t ask you were totally clear.
Thudlow Boink, your impression was correct.
I got that rascal now!
Thanks for your help, guys!

hh

6

Which means that the sum of your 68 values should be 10x1 + 16x2 + 22x3 + 4x4 + 14x5 + 2x6 = 206, which divided by 68 gives you a mean of about 3.03. And the median would be between the 34th and 35th value on the list, both of which are 3s, so median = 3. Does that sound right, hh?

7

That sounds just about perfect, **Thudlow. **
I appreciate your help very much!

hh