| Type of scale | Meaningful | Examples | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Order of categories | Distances between categories | Ratios between values | ||
| Nominal | No | No | No | Subject category.
Occupation |
| Ordinal | Yes | No | No | Maclean's rankings of university libraries.
MLIS students' ranking of electives. |
| Interval | Yes | Yes | No | Year a book was published.
Date a Web site was last updated. |
| Ratio | Yes | Yes | Yes | Number of days a book was on loan.
Number of bytes in a file. |
| Type of scale | Measures of central tendency | Measures of dispersion | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mean | Median | Mode | Percentiles,
quartiles | Range,
standard deviation | Concentration measures, such as Simpson's l | |
| Nominal | No | No | Yes | No | No | Yes |
| Ordinal | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Yes |
| Interval
Ratio | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
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