Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Interval Measurement
Interval Measurement
Interval Measurement
In interval measurement the distance between attributes does have meaning. Interval data
cannot be multiplied or divided, however, it can be added or subtracted. For example, when
we measure temperature (in Fahrenheit), the distance from 30-40 is same as distance from
70-80. The interval between values is interpretable. Because of this, it makes sense to
compute an average of an interval variable, where it doesn't make sense to do so for ordinal
scales.
It is easy to remember the objective of this scale as “interval” equates to the interval or
distance between 2 variables. Another easy way to remember interval scale is that
subtraction is defined between the two variables.
Interval data can be discrete – with whole numbers like 8 degrees, 4 years, 2 months etc. or
continuous – with fractional numbers like 12.2 degrees, 3.5 weeks or 4.2 miles.
Likert Scale