![]() Measurement is the process of systematically assigning numbers to objects and their properties to facilitate the use of mathematics in studying and describing objects and their relationships. The point is that the level of detail used in a system of classification should be appropriate, based on the reasons for making the classification and the uses to which the information will be put. Similarly, a social scientist might be interested in collecting information about a person’s marital status in terms such as single-never married, single-divorced, and single-widowed, whereas to someone else, a person in any of those three categories could simply be considered single. For instance, an artist might differentiate among colors such as carmine, crimson, and garnet, whereas a layperson would be satisfied to refer to all of them as red. This kind of thinking in categories is a completely ordinary, everyday experience, and we are seldom bothered by the fact that different categories may be applied in different situations. (Although you could make an argument about different wavelengths of light, it’s not necessary to have this knowledge to classify objects by color.) Similarly, we often speak of the colors of objects in broad classes such as red and blue, and there is nothing inherently numeric about these categories either. For instance, the categories male and female are commonly used in both science and everyday life to classify people, and there is nothing inherently numeric about these two categories. Depending on where you live, this number may be expressed in either pounds or kilograms, but the principle of assigning a number to a physical quantity (weight) holds true in either case.ĭata need not be inherently numeric to be useful in an analysis. Similarly, when you step on the bathroom scale in the morning, the number you see is a measurement of your body weight. For instance, when you buy something at the store, the price you pay is a measurement: it assigns a number signifying the amount of money that you must pay to buy the item. ![]() This is not an esoteric process but something people do every day. That is, you must establish or adopt a system of assigning values, most often numbers, to the objects or concepts that are central to the problem in question. Before you can use statistics to analyze a problem, you must convert information about the problem into data. ![]()
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