What is the first step in calculating the standard deviation?

To calculate the standard deviation, the first step is to calculate the mean of the data points. The mean, or average, is essential because standard deviation measures how spread out the numbers in a data set are from the mean.

Once the mean is determined, you can then proceed to the next steps in the standard deviation calculation, which include finding the differences between each data point and the mean, squaring those differences, averaging the squared differences, and finally taking the square root of that average.

In this context, starting with the mean provides a baseline from which the variations of each data point can be analyzed, making it a critical first step in the process of finding the standard deviation. The other options, while related to data analysis, do not serve as the necessary starting point for calculating standard deviation.