Mean vs Median Income of cities (Seattle, Medina: real estate, sex offenders, high school)

[CityGirl72]

So I'm doing a little research and I've gotten to Statistics 101

So a city I'm looking at has a MEDIAN household income of 78 K
But a MEAN household income of 112K

If I'm correct MEAN is the AVERAGE, but Median is the middle number if all incomes were lined up lowest to highest.

Would you assume that this city in question, the majority of people have the 78K-ish, and then there some families there who are making boo koo (sp?) bucks making the average higher...correct?

[Ira500]

Yeah, the extreme outliers in the mean will skew the numbers ( those with the beaucoup bucks)...But in your example, the majority of people may not make the 78ish either, because the median just shows that there are an equal number of people making more and less than 78. I sort of remember another figure, the mode, which showed the most common number.

[CityGirl72]

DUH! I forgot MODE! I wish they'd put that on those city statistics websites!

[Topaz]

I think I remember from Statistics 101 that the median is the most "robust" and "meaningful" statistic.

[Chenebe]

So what is the mean, median, and mode household incomes in the Seattle area? Is there any way of breaking it down to Counties?

[allforcats]

City-Data data:
Seattle, Washington (WA) Detailed Profile - relocation, real estate, travel, jobs, hospitals, schools, crime, news, sex offenders
and Googling produces:
Median Household Income, Washington State | OFM
or
household income counties wa - Google Search

[seattlenextyear]

Mode isn't terribly useful unless the data is in large bins (categories, like 50-70K, 70-90K). Otherwise, since income is a continuous variable, the mode income would just be something arbitrary (e.g., 4 people have an income of $76,493.42, 3 people with $76,493.41).

[newfromjapan]

Get the census data and run an ANOVA summary output setting income as the dependent variable. If the correlation coefficient is high and the p-values are less than .01 at an alpha of .05 then I would say that the $78-80K/year stat you cite is statistically robust. There are quite a few outliers that live in Medina and Clyde's Hill that tend to skew the number's upward as one poster mentioned earlier.

[toughguy]

Originally Posted by CityGirl72

So I'm doing a little research and I've gotten to Statistics 101

So a city I'm looking at has a MEDIAN household income of 78 K
But a MEAN household income of 112K

If I'm correct MEAN is the AVERAGE, but Median is the middle number if all incomes were lined up lowest to highest.

Would you assume that this city in question, the majority of people have the 78K-ish, and then there some families there who are making boo koo (sp?) bucks making the average higher...correct?

The word you are looking for is beaucoup, which is French for "in abundance". Sorry if that sounds snobby, it's just that I took French in high school.

[sean98125]

A company I worked for went in to union negotiations bragging about how their mean wages were higher than most of the other similar businesses in the area. Once they looked at the median, however, they were paying less. Turns out that having 23 VPs and a CEO that made twice what the other CEOs were making skewed the numbers a little...