Which definition best describes ordinal scales?

Which definition best describes ordinal scales?

• A. Categories that are ordered, distances between ranks is not uniform (e.g., Likert scales)
• B. Categorical with no inherent order
• C. Distances between categories are equal
• D. Measurements with a true zero

Answer: (A)

Ordinal scales organize items into categories that are in a meaningful order, but the gaps between adjacent categories aren’t assumed to be equal. That means you can say one category is higher than another, but you can’t quantify exact differences between steps. A classic example is a Likert scale from strongly disagree to strongly agree; you know the order, but you can’t assert that the jump from disagree to neutral is the same as from neutral to agree. This is why the data are treated as ordinal and analyzed with methods that respect order without assuming equal intervals. The other descriptions describe different types of data: a nominal (categorical with no inherent order) scale, an interval scale where intervals are equal but there is no true zero, and a ratio scale where there is a true zero.

Ordinal scales organize items into categories that are in a meaningful order, but the gaps between adjacent categories aren’t assumed to be equal. That means you can say one category is higher than another, but you can’t quantify exact differences between steps. A classic example is a Likert scale from strongly disagree to strongly agree; you know the order, but you can’t assert that the jump from disagree to neutral is the same as from neutral to agree. This is why the data are treated as ordinal and analyzed with methods that respect order without assuming equal intervals.

The other descriptions describe different types of data: a nominal (categorical with no inherent order) scale, an interval scale where intervals are equal but there is no true zero, and a ratio scale where there is a true zero.