Question

What is the level measurement of the following Operational Definitions. i.e., Nominal, Ordinal or Interval level data?

1 The unemployment rates of the 50 states.

2 The region of country in which people were born

3 How frequently people attended religious services in the last two months.

4 The number of employees in different government agencies.

5 The number of times incumbent senators voted the way the president wanted them to vote on key pieces of legislation.

6 The occupation of candidates for public office (i.e. educator, lawyer, farmer, business person).

7 The percent of different corporations’ pretax profit accounted for by overseas sales.

8 Whether people read the daily newspaper every day, almost every day, frequently, occasionally, seldom, or never.

Answer 1

Nominal scale is a measurement scale where it represents the non quantitative data or where the number has no value.

Ordinal scale is a measurement where the variable under consideration is represented in a natural order.

Interval scale is a quantitative measure where the difference between two values has a meaning.

Based on these definitions we will classify the following data

1. Interval scale because unemployment rates of any state has a particular meaning and also differences between any two states has a meaning

2. Ordinal scale because region of any country is represented by North, South, East and West which has a natural order

3. Ordinal scale because it can be measured in such a way that very frequently, frequently, moderately etc which has an order

4. Interval scale because difference between number of employees of two different agencies has a meaningful difference.

5. Interval scale because here also the numbers has a meaningful difference

6. Nominal scale because it has no certain order and it's not a quantitative data also. So it is nominal scale