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Because variables conforming only to nominal or ordinal measurements cannot be reasonably measured numerically, sometimes they are grouped together as categorical variables, whereas ratio and interval measurements are grouped together as quantitative variables, which can be either discrete or continuous, due to their numerical nature.
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.
A nominal variable, or nominal group, is a group of objects or ideas collectively grouped by a particular qualitative characteristic. [3] Nominal variables do not have a natural order, which means that statistical analyses of these variables will always produce the same results, regardless of the order in which the data is presented. [1] [3]
Because variables conforming only to nominal or ordinal measurements cannot be reasonably measured numerically, sometimes they are grouped together as categorical variables, whereas ratio and interval measurements are grouped together as quantitative variables, which can be either discrete or continuous, due to their numerical nature.
Ordinal data is a categorical, statistical data type where the variables have natural, ordered categories and the distances between the categories are not known. [ 1 ] : 2 These data exist on an ordinal scale , one of four levels of measurement described by S. S. Stevens in 1946.
Ordinal variables have a meaningful ordering, while nominal variables have no meaningful ordering. A categorical variable that can take on exactly two values is termed a binary variable or a dichotomous variable; an important special case is the Bernoulli variable.
Scaling of data: One of the properties of the tests is the scale of the data, which can be interval-based, ordinal or nominal. [3] Nominal scale is also known as categorical. [ 6 ] Interval scale is also known as numerical. [ 6 ]
Nominal-polytomous, where the respondent has more than two unordered options. The nominal scale, also called the categorical variable scale, is defined as a scale used for labeling variables into distinct classifications and does not involve a quantitative value or order. Ordinal-polytomous, where the respondent has more than two ordered options