Commentary to Wan et al. (2014): Estimating the standard deviation from the sample size and range or quartiles

Abstract

This short note proposes two additive corrections to a pair of relations published in Wan et al. in order to extend them to a small sample size condition. In particular we focus the interest on the possibility to provide an estimate to the sample standard deviation when knowing only the sample size, the range and/or the quartiles. Our results allow to explicitely compute standard deviation, for instance with software R or any spreadsheet, for any sample size grater than 2. R codes and data are publicly available.