POL 3371 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Missing Data, Social Liberalism, Social Capital
2 Feb 2014
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Concepts: ideas or constructs that represent real world phenomena. Variables: provide measurement of concepts, contain different values, ex: democracy variable can have the following values, democratic country, non-democratic country, ex: political party affiliation in canada variable can have the following values, conservative, liberal, ndp, other party. In theory: nominal: a level of measurement describing a variable that has values that cannot be ranked in contrast to other types of variables. Ex: gender, political party affiliation, etc: ordinal: a level of measurement describing a variable with values we can rank/order along some dimension but cannot find the average value (mean). Ex: education (high school, university, post-graduate), socioeconomic status (high, medium, low) Interval/ratio: a level of measurement describing a variable whose values are rank/ordered and have equal distances between adjacent values. *in practice - ordinal variables are often treated as similar to interval/ratio variables. Basic operations in spss (statistical package for social sciences)
