Mathematics help?

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bouncyflabs

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bouncyflabs
Hello, was hoping there's a Math guru out there that could help me! My wife's on a health course, and has to do a questionnaire, I'm a programmer by trade, so it should be easy for me, but I'm scratching my head and googling like mad! haha...

Anyway, if you can work this out, that would be a great help!!

In short, the table below shows the description, min possible score to max possible score, and then on the far right, the actual score of the subject - which was me haha.. healthy or not? hmmm... that's a different question.

Age/ Gender 3 to 11 9
Health/Medical/Genetics -2 to 19 18
Stress 0 to 8 6
Environment 2 to 13 12
Lifestyle 3 to 15 9
Diet -2 to 12 10
Fitness -2 to 5 2
Social 2 to 7 3

Any advice would be appreaciated, need someone to shed some light into which direction to go.. or a formula would be superb! :)

Thanks in advance!
 
I'm a Maths teacher by trade and have a degree in the subject (albeit from a good few years ago!!) so I may be able to help, but I'm not sure what your question is, what are you trying to do with the numbers?
 
Haha, I can't believe I didn't actually ask my question!

I'm trying to find out the average, I assume this would be the weighted average? Usually, it's 9+18+6+12+9+10+2+3/8 and I'd get the average, but as the range is varied, it's not as simple, as the calculatiion I have would be meaningless.

So question is, what's the weighted average of those numbers please?
 
I'm not sure you want to do a weighted mean, I think some way of standardising the scores before calculating the average would be better, especially as the negative values could mess things up as well. Otherwise you'd have to decide on what weighting you wish to give each question, probably based on the range of the responses but I'm not sure how mathematically valid that would be.
 
Thanks for your reply.

I've got it all to start at zero and have a max of 100 instead, so that they all have the same starting point.

each of these categories have different amount of questions, not to work out the average of each catergory... arghhH! lol.
 
Ok, so to clarify (I think I know what you mean but I'd better check or I'll probably get something wrong), you have got each score as a value from 0-100, i.e. a percentage, presumably by doing [(your score-minimum value)/(max value-min value)]*100

So what I think is that you want to weight the mean of these values, weighted by the number of questions in each category; the more questions in the category, the more it counts towards the mean average. Does that make sense? If so it's relatively straightforward to do.
 
Ooo that's it! that's what i want to do! here;s the number of questions for each catergory

Catergory_______No of Questions
Age/ Gender_______4
Health/Medical/Genetics________4
Stress__________2
Environment____4
Lifestyle_______3
Diet_________3
Fitness____1
Social ________2
 
Excellent, so to find the weighted mean, you multiply the values by the weighting (in this case number of questions), add them up, and then divide by the sum of the weightings.

I'll show you how it works with your scores and you can just change it for other peoples.

Your original scores
Age/ Gender: 9
Health/Medical/Genetics: 18
Stress: 6
Environment: 12
Lifestyle: 9
Diet: 10
Fitness: 2
Social: 3

Your scores as percentages (rounded for ease)
Age/ Gender: 75
Health/Medical/Genetics: 95
Stress: 75
Environment: 91
Lifestyle: 50
Diet: 86
Fitness: 57
Social: 20

to get the weighted mean of these percentages given a weighting equal to the number of questions:

(75*4)+(95*4)+(75*2)+(91*4)+(50*3)+(86*3)+(57*1)+(20*2) / (4+4+2+4+3+3+1+2)

=1697/23

=74%

This is your weighted score.

Hope this makes sense :)
 
DGiant2000
Just because it went way over your head :dunce:

Bloody students...... :D
Click to expand...

I didn't even read it tbf... ;)

Ummm excuse me! I have some stats work to do in a week or two. Totally isn't just plugging numbers into some stats software and then submitting the results or anything. :guilty: :D
 
Aldo
He said "Help" Andy, not do it for him... :rolleyes:

:D
Click to expand...

Yes, I did ask for help, and wasn't expecting anyone to actually do it for me.. or the missus rather, but nevertheless, it's all appreciated, it's nice for someone to give up their time to help others, exactly how a teacher should be, not like the teachers in my son's school :rolleyes:
 

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