Tipos De Variables

What is the difference between categorical, ordinal and interval variables?
In talking about variables, sometimes you hear variables being described as categorical (or sometimes nominal), orordinal, or interval.  Below we will define these terms and explain why they are important.

Categorical

A categorical variable (sometimes called a nominal variable) is one that has two or morecategories, but there is no intrinsic ordering to the categories.  For example, gender is a categorical variable having two categories (male and female) and there is no intrinsic ordering to the categories. Hair color is also a categorical variable having a number of categories (blonde, brown, brunette, red, etc.) and again, there is no agreed way to order these from highest to lowest.  A purelycategorical variable is one that simply allows you to assign categories but you cannot clearly order the variables.  If the variable has a clear ordering, then that variable would be an ordinal variable, asdescribed below.

Ordinal

An ordinal variable is similar to a categorical variable.  The difference between the two is that there is a clear ordering of the variables.  For example, suppose youhave a variable, economic status, with three categories (low, medium and high).  In addition to being able to classify people into these three categories, you can order the categories as low, medium andhigh. Now consider a variable like educational experience (with values such as elementary school graduate, high school graduate, some college and college graduate). These also can be ordered aselementary school, high school, some college, and college graduate.  Even though we can order these from lowest to highest, the spacing between the values may not be the same across the levels of thevariables.  Say we assign scores 1, 2, 3 and 4 to these four levels of educational experience and we compare the difference in education between categories one and two with the difference in educational...