Using the range to calculate the coefficient of variation

In this research a coefficient of variation (C[V.sub.high-low]) is calculated from the highest and lowest values in a set of data. Use of C[V.sub.high-low] when the population is normal, leptokurtic, and skewed is discussed. The statistic is the most effective when sampling from the normal distribution. With the leptokurtic distributions, C[V.sub.high-low] works well for comparing the relative variability between two or more distributions but does not provide a very 'good' point estimate of the population coefficient of variation. With skewed distributions C[V.sub.high-low] works well in identifying which data set has the more relative variation but does not specify how much difference there is in the variation. It also does not provide a 'good' point estimate.