Philosophy Statistics Standard Deviation

Question

Consider the following list: (A) 1, 3, 4, 5, 7. What is the standard deviation of list A?

Is this data being asked from a population or a sample? I think it is being asked from a sample, and that would be 2.2361, but I am not sure, because if it is from a population the answer would be 2.

Answer 1

It is difficult to imagine that five observations would be considered a population, unless that were explicitly stated. So I think you're correct to consider it a sample and use $n-1 = 4$ in the denominator when computing the variance. I checked your computation in R statistical software and got the same answer you did.

a = c(1, 3, 4, 5, 7)
mean(a);  sd(a)
[1] 4
[1] 2.236068