🚀 go-pugleaf

Organization: University of Illinois at Chicago
Date: Wed, 16 Dec 1992 19:47:58 CST
From: <U53076@uicvm.uic.edu>
Message-ID: <92351.194758U53076@uicvm.uic.edu>
Newsgroups: sci.math.stat
Subject: Levels of measurement

Hi,
   Let me first apologize for boring you with such a mundane question.   Anyway
I am in a dispute about levels of measurement and the appropriate statistics to
use when dealing with data at the ordinal level.  I'd like to compare performan
ce on a communication task across two different contexts.  In both cases,
competence is measured on an ordinal scale, for simplicity's sake, 1, 2, 3.  It
has been my practice in the past to compute a Pearson product-moment correlatio
n between the two tasks and to use the resulting r as an indication of the
degree to which performance is consistent across tasks.  I recently was told
that this was an inappropriate test cause I was only at the ordinal level.  But
my references (see esp. Glass & Hopkins, 1984; Heermann & Braskamp, 1970) say
that the whole levels of measurement question has ben blown out of proportion,
and that the sort of usage I describe is just fine.  What do you think?

Glass, G. V., & Hopkins, K. D. (1984). Statistical methods in education and
    psychology.  Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Heermann, E. F., & Braskamp, L. A. (1970). Readings in statistics for the
    behavioral sciences.  Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.


Thanks in advance.  If I'm wrong about this, I'd like to change.  If I'm right,
I'd like to rub it in. . .  :-)

                               Bruce Lambert
                               Assistant Professor
                               Pharmacy Administration
                               U. of Illinois @ Chicago