Skip to content

Mode

The mode or modal value of a data set is the most frequently occurring value. It’s a measure of central tendency that tells you the most popular choice or most common characteristic of your sample.

When reporting descriptive statistics, measures of central tendency help you find the middle or the average of your data set. The three most common measures of central tendency are the mode, median, and mean.

How many modes can you have?

A data set can often have no mode, one mode or more than one mode – it all depends on how many different values repeat most frequently.

Your data can be:

  • without any mode
  • unimodal, with one mode,
  • bimodal, with two modes,
  • trimodal, with three modes, or
  • multimodal, with four or more modes.

Find the mode

  1. If the data for your variable takes the form of numerical values, order the values from low to high. If it takes the form of categories or groupings, sort the values by group, in any order.
  2. Identify the value or values that occur most frequently.

Find the mode with grouped data

A grouped frequency table organizes large numerical data sets into intervals or classes of values and reports the frequency of values in each class.

For grouped data, you can report the mode in two ways:

  • the modal class is the grouping with the highest frequency of values.
  • the modal value is estimated as the midpoint of the modal class.

The mode is only an estimate in this case, because the actual values within the modal class are unknown.

You have a data set that includes the average reaction times of participants. You organize the data into a frequency table.

Reaction times are placed in classes of 100 milliseconds each. The frequency column shows the number of participants within each class.