PSYC 382-Week 3

Scales of Measurement
-Nominal, ordinal, interval, ratio
-Correlation coefficient: could be positive or negative; can use it in repeated settings
-Correlational research—important when you want to do a study where you cannot ethically
manipulate something; not artificial, you measure naturally occurring events; they’re
repeatable
-disadvantages: correlation does not mean causation—does not mean that one causes
the other; directionality problem—we do not know what would cause what (x and y);
could be driven by a third variable (z)
-rats and mice are the most used in experiments

Scales of Measurement
Nominal: type of scale that contains rules as to whether or not two objects are equal or not
equal; what are the rules that determine if we are male or female (gender); putting people into
named categories—write out the rules as to what defines members of a category; talking just
about NAMES
-ex) we each have a nominal piece of information that defines us (our SS number—indicates
who we are)
-useful for naming things (eye color)
Ordinal: rules for deciding whether an object is equal to, less than, greater than something else;
“level of satisfaction”; some form of natural order that occurs in the data—can rank; example:
position in a race (the difference between who came in first and second)
-problem: we do not know exactly what the spacing means
-very common in psychology—characteristic of most scaling in personality science

Interval: also allows us to name things; puts things in a natural order (ex: smallest to largest);
makes a critical assumption that the underlying metric being used to measure consists of equal
intervals; ex) temperature in Fahrenheit—ordered, equal differences between temperatures
Ratio: has all the characteristics of ordinal and interval ((name things, natural order, etc); has
something called a rational/a true zero—thus, the ratio between variables can be calculated;
ex) money, weight (theoretically possible); you can use all math operations