Rounding

• Number of decimal places used in reporting a statistic will differ depending on nature of the variable being reported

  • Number of places depends on how precise need to be to make point
  • Most commonly, reported to two decimal places

• Intermediary calculations should be done using at least one decimal place beyond the number of decimal places plan to use in final answer

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• The average income of a group of individuals might be rounded to the nearest whole dollar (for example, $10,030), whereas the average number of seconds it takes a group of rats to run a maze might be reported to two decimal places (for example, 5.32 seconds).

• If you are performing computations on a calculator, rounding error can be substantially reduced by keeping all digits shown until you round the final result