What best describes ordinal data?

What best describes ordinal data?

• A. Ranking; differences cannot be measured; order matters
• B. Qualitative data with no order
• C. Distances between values are meaningful
• D. Contains a true zero

Answer: (A)

Ordinal data are values that can be ordered; the key idea is ranking where higher values indicate more of the attribute and the order matters. But the exact differences between adjacent ranks aren’t known or assumed to be equal, so you can’t quantify how much one rank exceeds another. This is why the distances between values aren’t meaningful, even though there is a clear order. An example is a Likert-type rating or a class rank—the position matters, but you can’t say precisely how much one step is worth compared to the next. Because of this, you can summarize with the median or mode and compare by order, but you wouldn’t treat the data as having equal intervals or compute a true mean or standard deviation. The other descriptions describe nominal data (no order) or interval/ratio data (meaningful distances or a true zero), which don’t fit ordinal data. Therefore, ranking with order but without meaningful differences best describes ordinal data.

Ordinal data are values that can be ordered; the key idea is ranking where higher values indicate more of the attribute and the order matters. But the exact differences between adjacent ranks aren’t known or assumed to be equal, so you can’t quantify how much one rank exceeds another. This is why the distances between values aren’t meaningful, even though there is a clear order. An example is a Likert-type rating or a class rank—the position matters, but you can’t say precisely how much one step is worth compared to the next. Because of this, you can summarize with the median or mode and compare by order, but you wouldn’t treat the data as having equal intervals or compute a true mean or standard deviation. The other descriptions describe nominal data (no order) or interval/ratio data (meaningful distances or a true zero), which don’t fit ordinal data. Therefore, ranking with order but without meaningful differences best describes ordinal data.