Question 1: What are the advantages to using the mean as a measure for central tendency? What about disadvantages? Use a criminal justice variable to illustrate these advantages and disadvantages.

Question 2: What is the normal distribution/curve, and why is it important to understand? Again, use a criminal justice variable to assist in answering this question.

Question 3: Discuss how to identify skewed distributions. How can you tell if it is positively or negatively skewed? What does the skew tell you about the data distribution? How can the median and mean be used to determine the shape of a distribution?

Question 4: Discuss the standard deviation. What does taking the square root transformation of the variance do? Why is this calculation important? How does the standard deviation relate to the normal curve?

Question 5: Discuss how to identify kurtosis in distributions. How can you tell if a distribution suffers from platykurtosis or leptokurtosis? What does the kurtosis tell you about the data dispersion?

Question 6: Suppose you are reading a news article discussing bank-fraud victimization. The report features the story of one victim who was 38 years old when she discovered her bank account had been compromised and her money had been stolen. Because you are familiar with the National Crime Victimization Survey's Identity Theft Supplement, you know that the mean age of bank-fraud victims is 43.22, with standard deviation (s) = 13.86. Based on this, is the victim in the report typical of bank-fraud victims in terms of age? How do you know? Do you trust that her experiences are representative of other bank-fraud victims? Explain your answer.