levels of measurement

Question 1

what is nominal data

Answer 1

nom=name
data allocated into categories and frequencies counted
e.g. how many days of week were sunny

Question 2

what is ordinal data

Answer 2

• involves ranking data into place order, with rating scales often used to achieve this
• e.g. 1st, 2nd 3rd in a race, showing which athletes are better than others but doesn’t tell us distances between athletes
• crudest type of data - most uninformative - doesn’t tell us HOW sunny/rainy it is
• more informative than nominal but still lacks being fully informative

Question 3

what is interval data

Answer 3

-standardised measurement units e.g. time, weight and distance
-most informative, accurate data
-uses equal measurement intervals (one second is the same length as any other second)
-interval and ratio classed together as the apply to the same statistical tests
interval/ratio = scale that starts from meaningful zero