PSY30100 Lecture 12: SPSS Identifying Measuring Scales
Document Summary
Nominal if the values of the variable describe groups of individuals or qualitative characteristics of individuals, the scale used is nominal. The variable gender has two values 1 and 2, which represent male and female. 1 and 2 cannot be averaged or used to calculate other values because gender cannot be quantified. Hence, to set the scale to nominal: go to variable view, go to the measure column, click on the cell in gender row, select nominal. Characteristics of nominal scale: the only value that can be calculated from nominal data is mode, if you were to create a histogram with gender on the x-axis, it would automatically convert to a bar graph. Ordinal if the values of the variables are a discrete set of numbers, each representing a degree of positive or negative characteristic, yet the difference in values is subjective, the scale is ordinal.
