Level of measurement or scale of measure is a classification that describes the nature of information within the values assigned to variables. Psychologist Stanley Smith Stevens developed the best-known classification with four levels, or scales, of measurement: nominal, ordinal, interval, and ratio. This framework of distinguishing levels of measurement originated in psychology and is widely criticized by scholars in other disciplines. Other classifications include those by Mosteller and Tukey, and by Chrisman. Stevens's typology Overview Stevens proposed his typology in a 1946 Science article titled "On the theory of scales of measurement". In that article, Stevens claimed that all measurement in science was conducted using four different types of scales that he called "nominal", "ordinal", "interval", and "ratio", unifying both "qualitative" (which are described by his "nominal" type) and "quantitative" (to a different degree, all the rest of his scales). The concept of scale types later received the mathematical rigour that it lacked at its inception with the work of mathematical psychologists Theodore Alper (1985, 1987), Louis Narens (1981a, b), and R. Duncan Luce (1986, 1987, 2001). As Luce (1997, p. 395) wrote: Comparison Nominal level The nominal type differentiates between items or subjects based only on their names or (meta-)categories and other qualitative classifications they belong to; thus dichotomous data involves the construction of classifications as well as the classification of items. Discovery of an exception to a classification can be viewed as progress. Numbers may be used to represent the variables but the numbers do not have numerical value or relationship: for example, a globally unique identifier. Examples of these classifications include gender, nationality, ethnicity, language, genre, style, biological species, and form. In a university one could also use hall of affiliation as an example. Other concrete examples are in grammar, the parts of speech: noun, verb, preposition, article, pronoun, etc. in politics, power projection: hard power, soft power, etc. in biology, the taxonomic ranks below domains: Archaea, Bacteria, and Eukarya in software engineering, type of faults: specification faults, design faults, and code faults Nominal scales were often called qualitative scales, and measurements made on qualitative scales were called qualitative data. However, the rise of qualitative research has made this usage confusing. If numbers are assigned as labels in nominal measurement, they have no specific numerical value or meaning. No form of arithmetic computation (+, −, ×, etc.) may be performed on nominal measures. The nominal level is