The second type of descriptive statistics is the measure of dispersion, also known as a measure of variability. It is used to describe the variability in a dataset, which can be a sample or population. It is usually used in conjunction with a measure of central tendency, to provide an overall description of a set of data. A measure of dispersion/variability/spread gives us an idea of how well the central tendency represents the data. If we are analyzing the dataset closely, sometimes, the mean/average might not be the best representation of the data because it will vary when there are large variations between the data. In such a case, a measure of dispersion will represent the variability in a dataset much more accurately.

Multiple techniques provide the measures of dispersion in our dataset. Some commonly used methods are standard deviation (or variance), the minimum and maximum values of the variables, range, kurtosis, and skewness.