Question

Please think of an example of a value that you have seen or heard recently, and then tell us if this is qualitative or quantitative, is it discrete or continuous, and is it nominal, ordinal, interval, or ratio level of measurement. Classmates, do you agree with this categorization? Why or why not? These can be tricky to sort out, so we may have some back-and-forth discussion on these.

Answer 1

I will give you examples of scenarios of all kinds of categories in measurement. You may pick up one and extend it further for the discussion.

Recently, i was at an ice cream store. There was a feedback form that we had to fill in, which had questions where we had to rate a few attributes from a scale of 1 to 5. Some of questions were : Taste of the ice cream, Ambience of the store, How was the service, Was the product worth its price, etc. This type of "measurement" or analysis is called qualitative analysis/measurement. Such analysis are helpful in improving the overall performance of the company/firm/ organisation. Now, if i had to study the sales of the ice cream over a period of time, i will have to collect daily or weekly sales of ice cream from the store. Here, i will be dealing in the numbers, i.e., quantity. Computing the average sales and proposing methods to increase the sale of ice cream, would be a quantitative analysis.

Discrete and continuous:

Consider a situation where in i have to study the average number of people travelling by metro in a cosmopolitan city. For this, i will collect the information of number of commuters/passengers. These will be discrete numbers. Eg, 1000 passengers per week, etc. This kind of data is discrete data.

Suppose i have to study how efficient is the metro system with respect to the arrivals of trains on time. Here, every train's arrival time will be an interval. Eg, 10:50 am to 10 am. (The train's arrival time of every day wont be perfect to the minute, naturally. It will be few minutes here and there). Lesser the length of this interval, more efficient will the arrival timings be. This is an example of continuos value. (Interval value).

Furthermore, if i have to study the preference of males and females for travelling in a metro, i will have to work on finding the proportion or the ratio of males and females passengers. This will be a ratio measurement.

Agreement with such categorisation:

Above mentioned each scenario need a statistical tool to compute results. And each category, namely, discrete, continuous, qualitative, quantitative, nominal, ordinal, etc, have a unique method of evaluation of the desired result. Handling any sample will definately be easier if it is categorised. So yes, o do agree with this categorization.

You may pick up any scenario above and extend it a bit so that they will be lengthy enough for a discussion. Hope this answer helps. Feel free to leave a feedback . All the best..!