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MEASUREMENT SCALES
Measurement exists in several levels depending on what is to be measured, the instrument
to be employed, the degree of accuracy or precision desired and the method of
measurement. There are four levels of measuring scales. These are nominal, ordinal,
interval and ratio scales.
1. Nominal Scale
Some of the times, you are involved in the classification of objects, things, human beings,
animals, etc. For instance, you can classify human beings as males and females, you can
also classify living things as plants and animals.
Have you ever assigned your students into classes or groups? Nominal scale which is the
simplest of the measurement scales involves only the assignment to classes or groups and
does not imply magnitude. It is used when we are interested in knowing if certain objects
belong to the same or different classes. We may decide to assign teachers in the school
system into two groups of graduate teachers = 1 and non-graduate teacher = 0. You will
note that these numbers are just codes, as they do not indicate magnitude. We may group
students into classes A, B, C D,
etc. These are also codes. There is no order involved here, there is nothing like greater than
or less than. Any letter, number or numerals used in a nominal scale have no quantitative
