Measurement Scales (1 of 6)

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Measurement is the assignment of numbers to objects or events in a systematic fashion. Four levels of measurement scales are commonly distinguished: nominal, ordinal, interval, and ratio.

There is a relationship between the level of measurement and the appropriateness of various statistical procedures. For example, it would be silly to compute the mean of nominal measurements. However, the appropriateness of statistical analyses involving means for ordinal level data has been controversial. One position is that data must be measured on an interval or a ratio scale for the computation of means and other statistics to be valid. Therefore, if data are measured on an ordinal scale, the median but not the mean can serve as a measure of central tendency.

The arguments on both sides of this issue will be examined in the context of an hypothetical experiment designed to determine whether people prefer to work with color or with black and white computer displays. Twenty subjects viewed black and white displays and 20 subjects viewed color displays. next