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How healthy a person feels is an example of a/an ______ scale

a. ordinal
b. ratio
c. nominal
d. interval

1 Answer

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Final answer:

How healthy a person feels is categorized on an ordinal scale, which ranks in order without measurable differences between rankings. Unlike interval and ratio scales, ordinal scales do not allow for meaningful arithmetic calculations.

Step-by-step explanation:

The feeling of how healthy a person is represents a type of data on an ordinal scale. The ordinal scale is used to categorize data that can be placed in a specific order or rank, but the differences between the rankings cannot be accurately measured. This is because the data represent categories that have a natural order, such as rankings of comfort, satisfaction, pain levels, etc.

An example of ordinal data is survey responses that are ranked from 'excellent' to 'unsatisfactory'. These responses are ordered but do not have a quantifiable difference between them. Unlike interval scales and ratio scales, ordinal scales do not have true zero points or equal intervals between units. Therefore, they cannot be used to perform arithmetic operations such as addition or subtraction where the differences between numbers have true value as they do with interval and ratio scales.

Interval scales and ratio scales provide more information since they contain both an ordered relationship and a meaningful measurement of the difference between data points. Interval scales do not have a true zero point, while ratio scales do, allowing ratios to be calculated.

User Hanlin Wang
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