The levels of measurement in social research.

Q.3. Answer any two of the following questions in about 300 words each :

     Discuss the levels of measurement in social research.

Measurement in Social Research

The Concept of Measurement The concept of measurement refers to the process of describing abstract concepts in terms of specific indicators by assigning numbers to these indicants in accordance with rules. Measurement of social phenomena has become an essential prerequisite because of a number of reasons. One of the important reasons for measuring social phenomena is to allow the researcher the opportunity of using these phenomena in hypotheses to determine the effects of a set of variables on others. (Black and Champion, 1976) Let us consider the following hypothesis: “the adults who are lower in their self-esteem will tend to become chronic absentees in adult literacy classes than the adults with higher self-esteem” (a social psychological component of personality).

Testing of this hypothesis needs a formal theoretical scheme where ‘self-esteem’ would be related systematically to ‘absenteeism’ in a causal fashion. One part of the testing process would consist of determining rank of absentees of the adults from the attendance records. We would match those adults with another group of adults selected randomly; from the same village who are regular in attending their classes. To ensure comparable samples of “absentees” and “regulars”, the groups could be matched according to several other characteristics such as age, sex, year of education, socioeconomic background, education and occupation of parents and others.

Levels of Measurements

Social phenomena can be measured in various ways, such as by asking questions or noting/observing behaviour. Measurement also differs from one another in terms of the level of measurement. Level of measurement refers to a set of rules that defines permissible mathematical functions that can be performed on numbers/scores produced by a measure. There are four levels of measurement, namely; nominal, ordinal, interval and ratio.

Nominal Level of Measurement

Nominal level of measurement is the lowest and simplest most level of measurement. When a variable is classified into several nominal sub-classes it is said that the variable in question is measured on a nominal level. For example, the variable sex has two nominal sub-classes; male and female. Similarly, religion has many sub-classes, if not infinite, among which are included Hindu, Muslim, Christian and Sikhs.

Ordinal Level of Measurement

When the relative positions of objects or persons with respect to some characteristics are defined, measurements are possible on ordinal levels. The fundamental requirement of an ordinal level of measurement is that one is able to determine the order of positions of objects or persons in terms of characteristics under study. Ordinal level measurements are considered of higher level than nominal level because in addition to being mutually exclusive (feature of nominal level of measurement) the categories have a fixed order. Level of education, for example, constitutes an ordinal variable and measures levels of education on ordinal scales

Interval Level of Measurement

Interval-level between the categories of measurement have equal spacing in addition to the characteristics of nominal level (mutually exclusive) and ordinal level (having fixed order). In interval measures the positions are not only ordered either in ascending order (lower, middle and higher) or in descending order (higher, middle and lower) but the intervals of measurement are also equal. In other words, the distance between the positions is equal, such as the degrees of a temperature scales. The examples of true interval scales are Fahrenheit and Celsius temperature scales. The units of measurement of both the scales are degree and are based on equal spacing characteristics of interval- level of measurement.

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