PAP 3310 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Construct Validity, Spurious Relationship, E-Government

• School: University of Ottawa
• Department: Public Administration
• Course: PAP 3310
• Professor: Ivan Katchanovski

Document Summary

An idea or a term that enables us to describe or classify phenomena. Examples: equality, corruption from personal gain is most common, democracy, party identification, political participation, e-government development, education. Quantifiable measure of a concept: variation of values (black skin, white skin, etc. ) Examples of variables: level of education, preference for equality v. freedom, gross domestic product, income, e-government openness, indexes: a composite measure created from related variables. Nominal: the only difference that exists between participants is being in one category or another: categories cannot be ordered by rank, cannot do arithmetic or math operations with the categories. Ordinal: the categories of the variable can be rank ordered: e. g. Distance or amount of difference between categories is not equal. Cannot do arithmetic or mathematical operations with the categories. Interval/ratio: distance or amount of difference between categories is uniform: e. g. Can do arithmetic and math operations with the categories. Ratio variables have a 0 start position.