The Research Process: Nominal Level of Measurement

Levels of measurement
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Levels of measurements
Measurement involves judgment of the size of things. In most cases, people judge concerning what they think about particular outcomes. Values are assigned to outcomes and in this case, they form the measurement of the outcome. According to Stephens (1951, cited by Salkind, 2012), there are four levels of measurement; they are nominal level, ordinal level, interval level and ratio level. All kinds of measurements can be classified into one of these levels.
The nominal level of measurement is used to classify discrete variables in categories considering their quality instead of quantity (Salkind, 2012). For instance, having a group of wild animals that constitute of lions and giraffes, they can be grouped into two groups; A Lions and B Giraffes. Numbers that may be used in nominal measurement have no value. The second level of measurement is ordinal; according to Salkind (2012), variables under ordinal can be ranked. For example, first, second, third and fourth; in this case, ordinal measures discrete variables since there is no rank such as 1.23.
Interval is the third level of measurement; it measures the variables that have numbers as their values; for instance, recording the body temperature of children suffering from malaria. There equal interval between the variables, for instance, the number of days in a week. Some calculations can be performed under interval, for example getting the difference between the values. The variables for ratio have the same criteria as interval; h...