Question

If an investigator desired to describe basketball players based on jersey number.

(i) What level of measurement would the variable jersey number be?

(ii) Now suppose the investigator felt that certain players who were of lower caliber received higher numbers, what would be the level of measurement of the variable jersey number? Explain.

Answer 1

Answer :

1. Nominal measurement.

Reason : In nominal measurement the numerical values just “name” the attribute uniquely.No ordering of the cases is implied.The jersey number of a player does have any significance.A player with number 30 is not more of anything than a player with number 15, and is certainly not twice whatever number 15 is.

2. Ordinal measurement

Reason : In ordinal measurement the attributes can be rank-ordered.Here we are ordering the players caliber according to jersey number, the player with higher jersey number has lower caliber and the player with high caliber has lowest jersey numeber.This is sort of ordering the players and ranking them, as a result the variable is an ordinal measurement.

Hope this helps.