Geography 390: Applied Statistics in Geography
Exercise 2: Geographic Data II

The justification of measurement scale is very important, thus you need to be thorough in order to get full credit. Your justification must make it clear that the data cannot be any other scale of measurement than the one you've indicated. For full credit, you need the following information:

Nominal scale data: you have categorical data and the categories cannot be ranked or ordered; they are just different.

Ordinal scale data: you have categorical data and the categories can be ranked or ordered, however, there is no standard meaningful unit of distance separating the categories. You should also indicate whether the data are weakly or strongly ordered.

(The lack of a standard meaningful unit of distance separating the categories is important to note because sometimes with strongly ordered data, where each observation is assigned a rank, it may be that no two observations have the same rank. These ranks, however, are just categories because you can't say how far the observation with a rank of 1 is away from the observation with a rank of 2.)

Interval scale data: There is a standard meaningful unit of distance separating observation values and zero is arbitrary.

The standard meaningful unit of distance means that you can add and subtract, but because zero is arbitrary, you cannot multiply or divide.

Ratio scale data: There is a standard meaningful unit of distance separating observation values and zero is not arbitrary; zero indicates the absence of whatever it is you are measuring.

The standard meaningful unit of distance means that you can add and subtract, and because zero is not arbitrary, you can also multiply and divide.