Nominal Scale


A nominal scale is one of four commonly-used Levels of Measurement. No ordering is implied, and addition/subtraction and multiplication/division would be inappropriate for a variable on a nominal scale. {Female, Male} and {Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Muslim} have no natural ordering (except alphabetic). Occasionally, numeric values are nominal: for instance, if a variable were coded as Female = 1, Male = 2, the set {1,2} is still nominal.