Question

what type of variables are leadership behaviors (DV), worker's performance and productivity (DVs)? Like are they nominal, interval, ordinal, or ratio variables? or what type of measurement scales best fit each of the above variables? The research design is quantitative. Thanks.

Answer 1

To provide you with a clear idea regarding the four types of variables, here's a short definition for each of them:

• Nominal- Nominal comes from name.The important thing here is that there is no measure of distance between the values. The answer is determined, yes or no. So there is no question of how far apart in a quantitative sense those categories are. For example, male and female.

• Ordinal- Ordinal implies order and order means ranking. So, you can have higher and lower amounts. Less than and greater than are meaningful terms with ordinal variables where they were not with nominal variables. For example, you can't rank male and female as higher and lower but you can rank stages of cancer, as higher and lower.

• Interval- Interval variables have the property that differences in the numbers represent real differences in the variable. For example, the difference between 36 degrees and 37 degrees compared to the difference between 40 degrees and 41 degrees on a temperature scale. Because the differences in the numbers are the same, you know that the temperature intervals are the same.

• Ratio- Ratio variables have all the properties of interval variables plus a real absolute zero. Here, a zero value represents the total absence of the variable being measured. Some examples of ratio variables are the common measures of length, mass, time etc.

I made the following flowchart to explain how the above variable types are actually classified:

From above, it is clear that variables such as leadership behavior, worker's performance and productivity can be classified as qualitative variables. Naturally, they would come under nominal variables. However, if you are considering these qualities in some particular order of preference (rank), they will be classified as ordinal variables.

Since you mentioned that the research design is quantitative, you may assign these qualities a numeric rank value and classify them as interval or ratio variables accordingly- 'Interval' if you do not assign a zero value to any of the variables and 'Ratio' if a zero value is assigned to any of the variables.

Hope this helps!