| Sumario: | By both random and nonrandom assignments of numbers to rank orders (which are consistent with the monotonic nature of the categories), it is shown that ordinal variables can be treated as if they conform to interval scales. The scoring systems, of which 18 were randomly generated by a computer, resulted in negligible error when comparing any assigned scoring system with any selected "true" scoring system. Errors are determined by the Pearsonian correlation coefficient (r) and r². The advantages of treating ordinal variables as interval are demonstrated with regard to the relation between occupational prestige and suicide. These advantages include: (1) the use of more powerful, sensitive, better developed and interpretable statistics with known sampling error, (2) the retention of more knowledge about the characteristics of the data, and (3) greater versatility in statistical manipulation (e.g., partial and multiple correlation and regression, analysis of variance and covariance, and most pictorial presentations). The computer approach to this problem does not exhaust all possibilities for assigning numbers, which partially limits the generality of the findings.
|
|---|