In a study of births from New York State, data were collected from 4 hospitals and coded as follows: (1) Albany Medical Center (
1438) Bellevue Hospital Center (66) Olean General Hospital (413) Strong Memorial Hosptial Does it make sense to calculate the mean of the numbers 1, 1438, 66, and 413?
For this case the codification used is just a notation to identify the hospital. No matter if the code is a numerical value not makes sense calculate the average for these numbers since that not represent any statistic useful for the study.
And the other reason why is not appropiate calculate the mean of these numbers is that if we calculate the mean we don't have a maning for this number since we can't say the mean for the codes is (a number) since that's irrrelevant for the study.
