Factors Affecting Measurement

Level of Measurement

• Nominal: Name only, just words - numbers have no ranking, weight, meaning.
  • Gender
  • Yes or No
  • Ethnicity (African American, Native American, Asian American, Caucasian… etc)
• Ordinal: Ranking or weighting of responses, but not real mathematical properties
  • Attitude surveys Strongly Agree | Agree | Disagree | Strongly Disagree
  • Questions that ask for relative answers and are formatted by least to most

• Interval: Mathematical properties, even spacing between categories & no true zero

• Ratio: Raw numbers, true zero
  • precise, exact - “How many times did you miss class?”

Statistically Viable, Areas to Explore

Reliability

• Reliability focuses on consistency
• The scale being off, so appears to be valid

Validity

• Validity focuses on the accuracy of the statistics
• Having the scale be the correct number
• Does the measure the measure?

Methods of Data Collection

Qualitative: More ideographic method of data collections

• Open ended questions & answers
• Depth of human experience
• Instead of stats we analyze themes & patters of quotes
• More in respondent’s own words
• Focus groups or ethnographic interview
• Inductive (not testing a hypotheses)

Quantitative: A non-mothetic & deductive method of data collection

• Statistical & closed ended
• Helps make generalizations / describes large groups
• Superficial - not in-depth