Food Choice. As you discovered earlier, ordinal data are data about order or rank given on a scale such as 1, 2, 3,... or A, B, C,.... Most statisticians recommend using the median to indicate the center of an ordinal data set, but some researchers also use the mean.

In the paper “Measurement of Ethical Food Choice Motives”

(Appetite, Vol. 34, pp. 55–59), research psychologists M. Lindeman and M. Va¨an¨ anen of the University of Helsinki published a study on ¨

the factors that most influence people’s choice of food. One of the questions asked of the participants was how important, on a scale of 1 to 4 (1 = not at all important, 4 = very important), is ecological welfare in food choice motive, where ecological welfare includes animal welfare and environmental protection. Here are the ratings given by 14 of the participants.

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a. Compute the mean of the data.

b. Compute the median of the data.

c. Decide which of the two measures of center is best.