Continuous & Categorical Descriptive Variables

The continuous variable selected for the study is the “Lived Poverty Index (average index of 5 poverty items)” which had 50923 valid entries and 664 missing entries. The mean was found to be 1.245; the median was 1.200, while the mode was 0. Therefore the measurement of central tendency for this variable was between 0 and 1.245. Given the fact that the variable is nominal, the most appropriate measure of central tendency would be mode, which is zero, which is the most frequent value of the variable.

Therefore, the single number that would represent the value of the variable through the dataset is zero. Consequently, most of the respondents who took part in the study are so poor that they cannot afford necessities in a year (Wagner, 2020). In terms of variability, it was found that the variable had a standard deviation of 0.9456, and a range of 4.0. Therefore, the difference between the lowest and highest variable is four.

The values of the variable were found to have a low variation as indicated by the standard deviation. This indicates that even though the difference between the richest and poorest respondents, most of the respondents were concentrated in the low poverty index. This indicates a society where there is a significant income level variability, and most people are concentrated around zero.

The categorical variable used or this education category of the respondents, indicated by a value of zero for those with no formal education, one for primary school level education, 2 for secondary level, three for tertiary level, and 9 for those who do not know. The mean was found to be 1.40; the median was 1.00, while the mode was 2. Therefore most of the respondents had a secondary school level education, indicating low educational attainment for the respondents. However, there are both educated and uneducated people as illustrated by the range of four indicating a significant disparity in educational attainment.

Finally, the data on age were collected from all the 51143 and the mean found to be 37.19 years while the average disparity was found to be 14.6 years.

Table 1: Descriptive Statistics for the Variables Education Category and Lived Poverty Index

Table 2: The Mean and Standard Deviation of the variable, Q1 (Age)

References

• Wagner, III, W. E. (2020). Using IBM® SPSS® statistics for research methods and social science statistics (7th ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.