Generally, the more observation there are, the more spread out they will be. One use of range in everyday life is in newspaper stock market summaries, which give the day's high and low numbers. Unlike range, variance takes into consideration all the data points in the data set. If all the observation are the same, the variance would be zero. The more spread out the observation are, the larger the variance.
Standard deviation indicates how close to the mean the observations are.
The larger the standard deviation, the more variation there is in the data set. Measures of Skewness Measures of position and variability tell us where the data are located and how dispersed they are. Measures of skewness are concerned with whether the data are symmetrically distributed, or the shape of the distribution. Most people are familiar with the distribution referred to as the normal, or bell-shaped, curve. Many of the statistics we use assume the data are distributed normally.