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Level of measurement or scale of measure is a classification that describes the nature of information within the values assigned to variables. [1] Psychologist Stanley Smith Stevens developed the best-known classification with four levels, or scales, of measurement: nominal , ordinal , interval , and ratio .
The following diagnostic systems and rating scales are used in psychiatry and clinical psychology. This list is by no means exhaustive or complete. This list is by no means exhaustive or complete. For instance, in the category of depression, there are over two dozen depression rating scales that have been developed in the past eighty years.
A rating scale is a set of categories designed to obtain information about a quantitative or a qualitative attribute. In the social sciences , particularly psychology , common examples are the Likert response scale and 0-10 rating scales, where a person selects the number that reflecting the perceived quality of a product .
The definition of measurement in the social sciences has a long history. A current widespread definition, proposed by Stanley Smith Stevens, is that measurement is "the assignment of numerals to objects or events according to some rule." This definition was introduced in a 1946 Science article in which Stevens proposed four levels of ...
Scales constructed should be representative of the construct that it intends to measure. [6] It is possible that something similar to the scale a person intends to create will already exist, so including those scale(s) and possible dependent variables in one's survey may increase validity of one's scale.
For example, two states of a property may be compared by ratio, difference, or ordinal preference. The type is commonly not explicitly expressed, but implicit in the definition of a measurement procedure. The magnitude is the numerical value of the characterization, usually obtained with a suitably chosen measuring instrument.
For example, a normed personality scale can help psychologists understand how some people are high in negative affectivity (NA) and others are low or intermediate in NA. With many psychoeducational tests, test norms allow educators and psychologists obtain an age- or grade-referenced percentile rank, for example, in reading achievement.
It is when a Likert scale is symmetric and equidistant that it will behave more like an interval-level measurement. So while a Likert scale is indeed ordinal, if well presented it may nevertheless approximate an interval-level measurement. This can be beneficial since, if it was treated just as an ordinal scale, then some valuable information ...