How to find the median number of siblings?

Question

Lets say we have 100 people, 50 people don't have siblings, 38 people have 1 sibling, 10 people have 2 siblings and 2 people have 3 siblings. I'm a bit confused how would I find the median number of siblings? Is this question the equivalent of having fifty-five 0s, thirty-eight 1s, ten 2s and two 3s in a sequence?

Answer 1

You say "55 people don't have siblings, 38 people have 1 sibling, 10 people have 2 siblings and 2 people have 3 siblings." That adds to $55+38+10+2 = 105$ people, not 100. (Maybe you meant 38 to be 33.) If the truth is that more than half have no siblings, then the median is 0.

Then in R statistical software the vector s of numbers of siblings you report is as shown below:

s = c(rep(0,55), rep(1,38), rep(2,10), rep(3, 2))
summary(s)
   Min. 1st Qu.  Median    Mean 3rd Qu.    Max. 
 0.0000  0.0000  0.0000  0.6095  1.0000  3.0000 
length(s);  sd(s)
## 105             # number of people reported
## 0.7402603       # sample standard deviation

Addendum for revised data:

s = c(rep(0,50), rep(1,38), rep(2,10), rep(3, 2))
summary(s)
   Min. 1st Qu.  Median    Mean 3rd Qu.    Max. 
   0.00    0.00    0.50    0.64    1.00    3.00 

Answer 2

Yes, It is equivalent, you would simply put in ascending order and find the middle number: i.e. 0- 55 times, 1- 38 times , 2- 10 times and 3- 2 times.

Hope this helps