preview

Difference Between Nominal And Nominal Scale

Better Essays

Nominal Scale
Nominal scale is also known as labels. It is most commonly used for labelling variables without any quantitative values assigned to it. In this classification of data is done without any measurement.
Example:
We can understand the nominal scale in more detail with below example:
A normal question asked to a boy that what is the colour of his hairs and below options are given to him.
a.) Black b.) Brown c.) Gray d.) Blonde e.) Other
If you notice in above example all the mentioned options are mutually exclusive which means no overlap and even none of them carry any numerical significance. The best way to remember is that ‘nominal’ seems more like a ‘name’ and the nominal scale seems like labels.
Let’s take one more example:
What is your gender?
a.) Male b.) Female
In this case, the nominal scale has only 2 categories i.e., male and female and this kind of nominal scale are known as dichotomous.
Sometimes in statistical analysis, non-numeric variables are given numeric values. For example, students who eat healthy breakfast are +1, the students who eat an unhealthy breakfast are 0 and the students who do not eat breakfast are -1. This is the way to get who is in which group but don 't really have value.

Ordinal Scale
An Ordinal scale is a measurement which looks at the variables where order matters but the difference does not matter. While thinking of the ordinal you must think about the word order. Hence, it is easy to remember as in this scale only order

Get Access