Video Transcript
What type of skewness is suggested in the box plot shown?
For data to be skewed, we recall that it has a long tail on one side or another. It’s not symmetrical. But what does that actually mean? Well, it means that values are skewed towards one side of the data or the other. Now data can be positively or negatively skewed if it’s not symmetrical. In data that’s positively skewed, the long tail is in the positive direction. Specifically, it means the mean is greater than the mode. And in data that is negatively skewed, the long tail is in the negative direction. And technically, we say that the mode is greater than the mean.
Now in this case, the information about the mean and mode doesn’t actually help us. So we’ll have to use the shape of the diagram instead. In our diagram, 𝑄 two, the median, is towards the left or the negative end of our diagram. This means the long tail will be towards the other end. It might look a little something like this if we consider it as a curve. But as we can see, it has a positive skew. And so the type of skewness that’s suggested in the box plot shown is positive or positive skew.
