The median is the middle value in a sorted list of numbers. Half the scores fall below it and half fall above it.

To find the median, arrange the data from lowest to highest and locate the central score. If the number of observations is even, the median is the average of the two middle scores. Because the median depends only on rank order, extreme values have little effect on it. In a set of household incomes that includes a few multimillionaires, the median gives a more representative picture of the typical household than the mean does.

Psychologists and other researchers often report the median when distributions are skewed or when ordinal data are involved. It is also useful for summarizing reaction times and other measures that can contain outliers. Together with the mean and mode, the median helps describe the center of a data set from different angles.

When the goal is to identify the score that splits the distribution in half, the median is the measure of choice.