“In addition, quantitative data may also be classified as being either Discrete or Continuous.” with the example: “Driving license number/ Voter ID number/ PAN number”.
However, these numbers are rather qualitative (nominal) and not quantitative.
Nice and clear explanation. It clears concept for people who are engaged or planning to do any survey work for paper writing.
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That’s what I would think. They are for labeling or categorizing, therefor I would say they are nominal. Same with a social security number. They may have some meaningful order in the grand scheme of things, to those dealing with licences or ID’s, but for most people they are nothing more than a way to label or id you.
However, neither do I know of any software that does this, nor do I believe it is required.
The concept is fairly straightforward, so I doubt someone would take the pains to create a program for this purpose.
GCS score is nominal scale, since the numbers are assigned to labels, and are not meaningful by themselves. Ditto for Apgar score.
Time to recover from anaesthesia (seconds to hours) would be ratio scale, since there is an absolute zero.
Thanks for pointing out my error. I had responded on the basis of the individual numerical values not being meaningful themselves, but forgot about the total score(s), and that those can be ordered.
I stand corrected- they are ordinal, not nominal.
I have a question….Would length of a program such as 0 to 3 months, 3 to 8 months or 9 months or greater be considered interval? I’m having a really hard time with this one. I’m 51 and taking an intro to statistics and actually enjoying it but I am having some difficulties. I think the absolute zeros are throwing me off.
It depends. If the length is in actual absolute numbers (3 months OR 6 months), then it is in ratio scale (absolute zero present), and you can compute mean duration.
However, if the length is in terms of a range (0-3; 3-6; 6-9), then it is ordinal, since one can arrange the items in ascending or descending order, but cannot compute mean duration from just the range values (to compute mean one would need to know the frequencies as well).