Level of measurement

Educational level: this is a tertiary (university) resource.

Completion status: this resource is ~50% complete.

Level of measurement (LoM) is an important characteristic of data. The LoM determines what types of descriptive, graphical, and inferential statistical analyses can be used. There are four levels of measurement:

Levels of measurement Categorical/nominal Ordinal Interval Ratio

Categorical/nominal

• The simplest type of variable is dichotomous (or binary, e.g., 0 = male/ 1 = female; 0 = black/ 1= white; 0 = yes/ 1 = no).
• Categorical or nominal variables simply provide numerical labels (or names) for two or more categories e.g., 0 = red/ 1 = blue/ 2 = green / 3 = yellow; 0 = car; 1 = bus; 2 = bicycle; 3 = aeroplane; 4 = train.

Ordinal

1. When categorical variables can be meaningful ordered, they become ordinal variables
2. The distance between the ordered categories may vary
3. e.g., 1 = 1st, 2 = 2nd, 3 = 3rd in a race; verbal frequency scale (0 = never, 1 = sometimes, 2 = often, 3 = always)

Interval

1. Ordered categories (discrete values) which have equal distances (e.g., Strongly Disagree - Disagree - Neither Agree or Disagree - Agree - Strongly Agree)
2. Allows use of parametrics statistics (which assume a normal distribution)

Ratio

1. Continuous (not discrete) - values can take on (in theory) infinite decimal points
2. Has a meaningful 0 (e.g., the 0 point isn't arbitrary), which allows ratio comparisons (e.g,. according to the sample of participants, males are, on average, 20% taller than females).

See also

• Level of measurement (Wikipedia)
• Psychological statistics
• Units of measurement

External links

• Summary of univariate descriptive statistics and graphs for the four levels of measurement (pdf)