The name is absent

Two hundred and eighty two adults were asked the question;
only one hundred and seventy nine offered a specific
number, see Table 1. (15) One hundred and three respondents
replied to the question but did not offer a specific
number. Their reply fell into the responses of either a
single word or an explanation about how difficult it was to
reach any conclusion. (16)

TABLE 1

Table 1 is arranged alphabetically by city, and it shows
the grouped data, that is, the number of respondents giving
a particular estimate of the size of the community. The
maximum number of respondents who answered the question
offering a specific size of the community was in Cochin;
the minimum number of respondents who answered the question
was in Coonoor - a single respondent gave the number two
hundred thousand. There was little variation between
Anglo-Indians and non Anglo-Indians. (17)

TABLE 2

In Table 2, (18) the arithmetic mean (simple average), the
variance and the standard deviation of respondents'
estimates is calculated. The average was 385,687 people
with a standard deviation of 251,541. The mode (the most
frequent answer) was 300,000 people and so was the median
(the middle number). The average deviation from the mode
(or median) was 152,302 people. The range of the estimates
was between 70,000 and 1,000,000 people, that is, 930,000
people. (19)

As the average deviation from the median (mode) is much
smaller than the standard deviation, this shows that the
mean and standard deviation are distorted by a significant
number of few extremely high values. Hence, the median and

214

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