I have collected short stories from subjects where each subject gave three stories. I have created a variable "order" which is encoded as 1 (first), 2(second) and 3 (third story). I want to check the impact of order on overall creativity (dichotomous)
Now my question is my variable "order" would be ordinal, nominal or interval.
Does it have order? Yes of-course
Does it have fixed distance: Yes
According to my understanding, it should be interval.
BUT, how can we define interval data in SPSS?
please correct me if I am wrong
I attach an e-book from boon books, see page 10-11. Take my word for it: your variable is ordinal. If you had only 2 categories, it would not matter, but with 3 categories you want to be sure that category 2 lies between category 1 and category 3. Good luck.
No, your variable es Nominal.
Your order doesn't mean than story 1 is greather (>) o lesser (
I would call your variable "order" an ordinal variable: it has only 3 possible values (1, 2 and 3), thus it cannot possibly be a scale variable. There is an ordering (1 is earlier than 2, and 2 is earlier than 3). Thus it is an ordinal variable. An ordinal variable is still a categorical variable, and the way a categorical variable is handled in statistical analysis does not entail artithmetic (such as means, variances and Pearson correlation coefficients) although rank methods are allowed. If you treat it as a nominal variable, you would lose the ordering.
Thanks a lot Francois E Steffens :) However I am confused. I received two answers and both have their own interpretation. could you please add a reference or specific example. I would appreciate.
@Julio: Thanks for answering. But order is very important in my study, If I used nominal, I may loss ordering. Isn't it? Could you please add a reference if you know any or specific example similar to my case. I would appreciate. This is very important decision that I have to take to proceed further.
I attach an e-book from boon books, see page 10-11. Take my word for it: your variable is ordinal. If you had only 2 categories, it would not matter, but with 3 categories you want to be sure that category 2 lies between category 1 and category 3. Good luck.
It can be any of those (and an infinite number of others) depending on how you are using the variable. see http://www-stat.wharton.upenn.edu/~hwainer/Readings/Frederick%20Lord_On%20the%20statistical%20treatment%20of%20football%20numbers.pdf
You will need to provide more information to get a meaningful response.
Your data is neither in ordinal scale nor in interval scale. It is only in nominal scale. You can try out some non-parametric analysis.
ORDINAL
the definition of ordinal variable corresponds to an attribute that is necessary and is given by the ORDER in which the story appears. The first story can be more or less creative than the second or third.
If you suppose that the first story is the least creative because it is the instantaneous one, the second one will depend on what it said in the first one so as not to repeat, and likewise with the third one. (Does the order intervene in the creative process?)
This would be the criterion for the deficion of its variable.
Interval is a scale and relates to the application of an objective measurement instrument.
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