The aim of this investigation is to explore the preservice teachers' reasoning about variation (variability or spread) when they analyze data in situations that involve risk. In particular, in this communication the responses to two problems of a questionnaire administered to 96 preservice teachers are reported. The problems are of comparing groups of data in situations of risk: stakes in games and the life expected after medical treatments. The questionnaire was applied before the preservice teachers began a course of statistical information processing and the results showed the difficulty found by students to interpret variation in this type of contexts. For these results it is necessary to reflect on the instruction of future teachers about the meanings of measures of center dispersion and dispersion to contribute to an improvement in their academic training. [This paper is written in both Spanish and English. For complete proceedings, see ED581294.]