In Search of the Most Likely Value.

Descripting Statistics provides methodology and tools for user-friendly presentation of random data. Among the summary measures that describe focal tendencies in random data, the mode is given the least amount of attention and it is frequently misinterpreted in many introductory textbooks on statistics. The purpose of the paper is to provide a formal definition of the mode and to show appropriate interpretation of this measure with respect to different random data types: qualitative and quantitative (discrete and continuous). Several cases are presented to exemplify this purpose. Instructional guidelines for implementing the cases, using Google Spreadsheet are provided.