Research Methodology

Laxman Pokhrel
mail@laxmanpokhrel.com.np/lax.pok@gmail.com Cell: 9851037897

Day 6

Date: 28th August,2012

The Importance OF Measurement in Research

Chapter 2

Day 6

Date: 28th August,2012

Unit 2:
Levels of Measurement
Level of Measurement

Four Levels of Measurement Nominal Ordinal Interval Ratio

Unit 2:
Levels of Measurement
Level of Measurement

Nominal Measurement
A nominal scale enables the classification of individuals, objects or responses into subgroups based on a common/shared property or characteristic. A variable measured on a nominal scale may have one, two or more subcategories depending upon the extent of variation Nominal scales focus on only requiring a respondent to provide some type of descriptive data as the raw response For example, water or tree have only one subgroup, whereas the variable gender can be classified into two sub-categories: male and female. Hotels can be classified into ---- sub-categories.

Unit 2:
Levels of Measurement
Level of Measurement

Nominal Measurement
Statistical operations like frequency, percentage, proportion, mode of coefficient of counting of contingency, addition, subtraction, multiplication and division are not applied This is also called attributes or qualitative characteristics such as age, sex, eye color, religion, nationality etc. No ordering of the cases is implied. For example, jersey numbers in basketball are measures at the nominal level. A player with number 30 is not more of anything than a player with number 15, and is certainly not twice whatever number 15 is

Unit 2:
Levels of Measurement
Level of Measurement

Nominal Measurement Some Examples of Nominal data Gender: Male, Female Religion: Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, Christian Occupation: Teacher, Manager, Doctor, Businessman, Civil Servant Nationality: Nepali, Indian, American, Japanese Department: Sales, Finance, Personnel, Production.

Unit 2:
Levels of Measurement
Level of Measurement

Nominal Measurement
Example. Please indicate your current martial status. __Married __ Single __ Single, never married __ Widowed

Unit 2:
Levels of Measurement
Level of Measurement

Ordinal Measurement
Besides categorizing individuals, objects, responses or a property into subgroups on the basis of common characteristic, it ranks the subgroups in a certain order. They are arranged either in ascending or descending order according to the extent a subcategory reflects the magnitude of variation in the variable. Ordinal scales allow the respondent to express relative magnitude between the raw responses to a question For example, income can be measured either quantitatively (in rupees and paisa) or qualitatively using subcategories above average, average and below average. The distance between these subcategories are not equal as there is no quantitative unit of measurement.

Unit 2:
Levels of Measurement
Level of Measurement

Ordinal Measurement The numbers are arranged from highest to lowest, or from lowest to highest order, and reflects the comparison in terms of higher or lower, heavier or lighter, harder to softer etc. For example, students may be ranked 1st, 2nd, 3rd etc. in terms of their academic achievements to constitute the example of ordinal measurement The relationship of equivalence, greater than or lesser than exists, because all members of any particular subclass or equivalent to each other and at the same time greater or lesser then the member of other classes The permissible statistical operations in ordinal measurements are median, percentile, rank, correlation coefficients

Unit 2:
Levels of Measurement
Level of Measurement

Ordinal Measurement
Example. Which one statement best describes your opinion of Ncell mobile? __ Better than NTC __ About the same as NTC __ Lower than NTC Another example: In a survey you might code Educational Attainment as 0=less than H.S.; 1=some H.S.; 2=H.S. degree; 3=some college; 4=college degree; 5=post college. In this measure, higher numbers mean more education. But is distance from 0 to 1 same as 3 to 4? Of course not. The interval between values is not interpretable in an ordinal measure.

Unit 2:
Levels of Measurement
Level of Measurement

Interval Measurement
An interval scale has all the characteristics of an ordinal scale. In addition, it uses a unit of measurement with an arbitrary starting and terminating points. Interval scales demonstrate the absolute differences between each scale point For example, Celsius scale: 0*C to 100*C Fahrenheit scale: 32*F to 212*F A temperature of 50 degrees is exactly 10 degrees hotter than 40 degrees and 10 degrees cooler than 60 degrees.

Unit 2:
Levels of Measurement
Level of Measurement

Interval Measurement
Interval data can be measured and compared by addition and subtraction because each point on the scale is an equal distance. The common statistics used in such measurements are arithmetic mean, standard deviation, Pearsons correlation coefficient and other statistics based upon them. Also T and F test are used to test the significance of the characteristics. In interval measurement the distance between attributes does have meaning. 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

Unit 2:
Levels of Measurement
Level of Measurement

Interval Measurement

Example. How likely are you to recommend the ABC teacher for the MBA program at LBEF? Definitely will not 0123456789 Definitely will

Unit 2:
Levels of Measurement
Level of Measurement

Ratio Measurement
A ratio scale has all the properties of nominal, ordinal and interval scales plus its own property: the zero point of a ratio scale is fixed, which means it has a fixed starting point. Since the difference between intervals is always measured from a zero point, this scale can be used for mathematical operations. Ratio scales allow for the identification of absolute differences between each scale point, and absolute comparisons between raw responses. The measurement of variables like income, age, height and weight are examples of this scale. A person who is 40 year old is twice as old as one who is 20 year old.

Unit 2:
Levels of Measurement
Level of Measurement

Ratio Measurement
Example 1. Please circle the number of children under 18 years of age currently living in your household. 0 1 2 3 4 specify ___.) 5 6 7 (if more than 7, please

Unit 2:
Levels of Measurement: in Summary
Level of Measurement

Unit 2: Levels of Measurement

Unit 2: Levels of Measurement

Unit 2:
The Importance OF Measurement in Research
Queries? Next class suggested readings Characteristics of Good Measurement. Reliability and Validity

Thank You