3.4 Measurement abstract

• “assignment of a number to a characteristic of an object or event, which can be compared with other objects or events” (Wikipedia)
• Measures are of different kind…
• Levels of measurement: “Level of measurement or scale of measure is a classification that describes the nature of information within the values assigned to variables” (Wikipedia)
  • Typologies (Stevens 1946; Chrisman 1998)
    • e.g. ordinal, nominal, interval, ratio (Stevens 1946)
    • e.g. qualitative vs. quantitative
• Measurement is a central issue when working with new data!
• What’s the most important thing in statistics that’s not in the textbooks?

References

Stevens, S S. 1946. “On the Theory of Scales of Measurement.” Science 103 (2684): 677–80.

Chrisman, Nicholas R. 1998. “Rethinking Levels of Measurement for Cartography.” N. Z. Cartogr. Geogr. Inf. Sys. 25 (4). Taylor & Francis: 231–42.