Data Levels of Measurement

There are different levels of measurement that have been classified into four categories. It is important for the researcher to understand the different levels of measurement, as these levels of measurement play a part in determining the arithmetic and the statistical operations that are carried out on the data. In ascending order of precision, the four different levels of measurement are:     nominal ordinal interval ratio

The first level of measurement is nominal measurement. In this level of measurement, the numbers are used to classify the data. Also, in this level of measurement, words and letters can be used. Suppose there are data about people belonging to two different genders. In this case, the person belonging to the female gender could be classified as F, and the person belonging to the male gender could be classified as M. This type of assigning classification is nothing but the nominal level of measurement. The second level of measurement is the ordinal level of measurement. This level of measurement depicts some ordered relationship between the number of items. Suppose a student scores the maximum marks in the class. In this case, he would be assigned the first rank. Then, the person scoring the second highest marks would be assigned the second rank, and so on. This level of measurement signifies some specific reason behind the assignment. The ordinal level of measurement indicates an approximate ordering of the measurements. The researcher should note that in this type of measurement, the difference or the ratio between any two types of rankings is not the same along the scale. The third level of measurement is the interval level of measurement. The interval level of measurement not only classifies and orders the measurements, but it also specifies that the distances between each interval on the scale are equivalent along the scale from low interval to high interval. For example, an interval level of measurement could be the measurement of anxiety in a student between the score of 10 and 11, if this interval is the same as that of a student who is in between the score of 40 and 41. A popular example of this level of measurement is temperature in centigrade, where, for example, the distance between 940C and 960C is the same as the distance between 1000C and 1020C. The fourth level of measurement is the ratio level of measurement. In this level of measurement, the measurements can have a value of zero as well, which makes this type of measurement unlike the other types of measurement, although the properties are similar to that of the interval level of measurement. In the ratio level of measurement, the divisions between the points on the scale have an equivalent distance between them, and the rankings assigned to the items are according to their size. The researcher should note that among these levels of measurement, the nominal level is simply used to classify data, whereas the levels of measurement described by the interval level and the ratio level are much more exact. Statistics Solutions can assist with your quantitative or qualitative analysis by assisting you to develop your methodology and results chapters. The services that we offer include:

Level of measurement
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The "levels of measurement", or scales of measure are expressions that typically refer to thetheory of scale types developed by the psychologist Stanley Smith Stevens. Stevens proposed his theory in a 1946 Science article titled "On the theory of scales of measurement".[1] In that article, Stevens claimed that all measurement in science was conducted using four different types of scales that he called "nominal", "ordinal", "interval" and "ratio".
Contents
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1 The theory of scale types o o o o 1.1 Nominal scale 1.2 Ordinal scale 1.3 Interval scale 1.4 Ratio measurement 2 Debate on classification scheme 3 Scale types and Stevens' "operational theory of measurement" 4 Notes 5 See also 6 References 7 External links

[edit]The

theory of scale types

Stevens (1946, 1951) proposed that measurements can be classified into four different types of scales. These are shown in the table below as: nominal, ordinal, interval, and ratio.
Admissible Scale Transformation Mathematical structure

Scale Type

Permissible Statistics

nominal (also denoted as mode, Chi-square categorical)

One to One (equality (=))

standard set structure (unordered)

ordinal

median, percentile

Monotonic increasing (order (<))

totally ordered set

interval

mean, standard deviation, correlation,regression, analysis of variance

Positive linear (affine)

affine line

ratio

All statistics permitted for interval scales plus the following: geometric mean, harmonic mean,coefficient of variation, logarithms

Positive similarities (multiplication)

field

Nominal scale
At the nominal scale, i.e., for a nominal category, one uses labels; for example, rocks can be generally categorized as igneous, sedimentary and metamorphic. For this scale, some valid operations are equivalence and set membership. Nominal measures offer names or labels for certain characteristics. Variables assessed on a nominal scale are called categorical variables; see also categorical data. Stevens (1946, p. 679) must have known that claiming nominal scales to measure obviously non-quantitative things would have attracted criticism, so he invoked his theory of measurement to justify nominal scales as measurement:
the use of numerals as names for classes is an example of the assignment of numerals according to rule. The rule is: Do not assign the same numeral to different classes or different numerals to the same class. Beyond that, anything goes with the nominal scale.

The central tendency of a nominal attribute is given by its mode; neither the mean nor the median can be defined.

We can use a simple example of a nominal category: first names. Looking at nearby people, we might find one or more of them named Aamir. Aamir is their label; and the set of all first names is a nominal scale. We can only check whether two people have the same name (equivalence) or whether a given name is in on a certain list of names (set membership), but it is impossible to say which name is greater or less than another (comparison) or to measure the difference between two names. Given a set of people, we can describe the set by its most common name (the mode), but cannot provide an "average name" or even the "middle name" among all the names. However, if we decide to sort our names alphabetically (or to sort them by length; or by how many times they appear in the US Census), we will begin to turn this nominal scale into an ordinal scale.

Ordinal scale
Rank-ordering data simply puts the data on an ordinal scale. Ordinal measurements describe order, but not relative size or degree of difference between the items measured. In this scale type, the numbers assigned to objects or events represent the rank order (1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc.) of the entities assessed. A Likert Scale is a type of ordinal scale and may also use names with an order such as: "bad", "medium", and "good"; or "very satisfied", "satisfied", "neutral", "unsatisfied", "very unsatisfied." An example of an ordinal scale is the result of a horse race, which says only which horses arrived first, second, or third but include no information about race times. Another is the Mohs scale of mineral hardness, which characterizes the hardness of various minerals through the ability of a harder material to scratch a softer one, saying nothing about the actual hardness of any of them. Yet another example is military ranks; they have an order, but no well-defined numerical difference between ranks. When using an ordinal scale, the central tendency of a group of items can be described by using the group's mode (or most common item) or its median (the middle-ranked item), but the mean (or average) cannot be defined.

Interval scale
Quantitative attributes are all measurable on interval scales, as any difference between the levels of an attribute can be multiplied by any real number to exceed or equal another difference. A highly familiar example of interval scale measurement is temperature with the Celsius scale. In this particular scale, the unit of measurement is 1/100 of the difference between the melting temperature and the boiling

temperature of water at atmospheric pressure. The "zero point" on an interval scale is arbitrary; and negative values can be used. The Likert scale, which is one of the most common scales used in survey research, would be a popular example and practical application of the 'interval scale'. Variables measured at the interval level are called "interval variables" or sometimes "scaled variables" as they have units of measurement. Ratios between numbers on the scale are not meaningful, so operations such as multiplication and division cannot be carried out directly. But ratios of differences can be expressed; for example, one difference can be twice another. The central tendency of a variable measured at the interval level can be represented by its mode, its median, or its arithmetic mean. Statistical dispersion can be measured in most of the usual ways, which just involved differences or averaging, such as range, interquartile range, and standard deviation. Since one cannot divide, one cannot define measures that require a ratio, such as coefficient of variation.

Ratio measurement
Most measurement in the physical sciences and engineering is done on ratio scales. Mass, length, time, plane angle, energy and electric charge are examples of physical measures that are ratio scales. The scale type takes its name from the fact that measurement is the estimation of the ratio between a magnitude of a continuous quantity and a unit magnitude of the same kind . Informally, the distinguishing feature of a ratio scale is the possession of a non-arbitrary zero value. For example, the Kelvin temperature scale has a non-arbitrary zero point of absolute zero, which is denoted 0K and is equal to -273.15 degrees Celsius. This zero point is non arbitrary as the particles that compose matter at this temperature have zero kinetic energy. All statistical measures can be used for a variable measured at the ratio level, as all necessary mathematical operations are defined. The central tendency of a variable measured at the ratio level can be represented by, in addition to its mode, its median, or its arithmetic mean, also its geometric meanor harmonic mean. In addition to the measures of statistical dispersion defined for interval variables, such as range and standard deviation, for ratio variables one can also define measures that require a ratio, such as coefficient of variation.