These are non-parametric tests. Parametric tests are used when your data fulfils certain criteria, like a normal distribution. While parametric tests assess means, non-parametric tests often assess medians or ranks. There are many possible statistical tests that you can use for ordinal data. Which one you choose depends on your aims and the number and type of samples.
Ordinal data has two characteristics:. Levels of measurement tell you how precisely variables are recorded. There are 4 levels of measurement, which can be ranked from low to high:. Nominal and ordinal are two of the four levels of measurement. Nominal level data can only be classified, while ordinal level data can be classified and ordered. In statistics, ordinal and nominal variables are both considered categorical variables. Even though ordinal data can sometimes be numerical, not all mathematical operations can be performed on them.
Overall Likert scale scores are sometimes treated as interval data. These scores are considered to have directionality and even spacing between them. The type of data determines what statistical tests you should use to analyze your data. Have a language expert improve your writing. Check your paper for plagiarism in 10 minutes.
Do the check. Generate your APA citations for free! APA Citation Generator. Home Knowledge Base Statistics Ordinal data: examples, collection, and analysis. Ordinal data: examples, collection, and analysis Published on August 12, by Pritha Bhandari.
Never 2. You can use the median and mode, if you want a measure of central tendency; you can also present frequency distributions for every response. Hi, Sir. I did not have any conflict understanding your discussion about Likert Scale. I just want to leave this comment for you are cool- that you answer the queries of my co-readers and co-researchers. Thank you, Sir. May God bless you and may you help more more people then on. Hi Achelleas, Thank you for your tutorial on calculating mean of ordinal data.
I was looking for literature to support my advice to my student that the mean score and standard deviation he calculated for a Likert scale had no meaning in the context of his study when I came across your blog. He surveyed patients concerning quality of hospital service. He calculated the mean of responses as 2. Obviously, the mean and SD makes no meaning in interpreting the results.
AS suggested in your blogs, I will advise the student to use median and mode to explain the central tendency of the responses. If you follow the links to the posts provided, I believe you will find the information you need.
I am not sure I understand what you are asking. However, the following post has some resources and bibliography which may be useful. That depends on the confidence interval and confidence level you need. What if I get a decimal number? You might get a decimal number x.
Hello, Im testing students attitudes towards English. I have respondents and 22 items using the ikert scale. What is the best way to analyze the data? My variable will be age, field of study and year of study. Yes, I understand that, but it is still unclear what you are trying to do: Are you trying to describe a population or test whether something is true?
You can do this by grouping your items into one or more multi-item scales assuming they are cohesive enough and running a t-test.
Alternatively you could run a cross-tab and chi square test with your independent variables and each item. Im trying to find out if the atttitudes of the respondents is positive ort negative and if the three variables i mentioned have an effect on that.
What do you mean by cohesive enough.. Perhaps you can try again, after you remove selected items from the scales. Kind of, depending on what statistical procedures you plan to do. If you do a cross tabs and chi-square with multiple values for each variable, it may throw your statistics off. What I ended up doing is normal descriptive analysis for each statement by showing the frequency of every answer for each statement.
Ill treat every variable seperately for eaach statement. I am currently drafting my graduate thesis on knowledge management KM and climate resilience KM. I have identified four variables for KM: gathering, storing, sharing, use; and 3 variables for resilience: buffer capacity, self-org, and learning capacity. The items for KM are constructed using Likert Scale: 1 — strongly disagree; 2 — disagree; 3 — neither agree nor disagree; 4 — agree; 5 — strongly agree.
I understand that above is in ordinal level and therefore should use only ordinal level analysis like mode, median, etc. My question now is regarding the items I have for resilience. At least college graduate — 5 College level — 4 High school graduate — 3 High school level — 2 Elementary level — 1 No formal education — 0.
Basic services are very accessible — 5 Basic services are accessible — 4 Basic services are moderately accessible — 3 Basic services are slightly accessible — 2 Basic services are not accessible — 1.
Also, what if I ask them to rank the climate risks in the community from 1 — 5 5 being the frequent climate risk in the community, 1 being low climate risk :.
In this case, your analysis options are more limited: you can only use frequency counts and the mode as a measure of central tendency. Thank you very much for the prompt response, sir. I just have a follow-up question, is it okay to have 0 in the scale? And should the scales for both KM and climate resilience be equal, like should they both have a 5-point scale or can I use 5-point for KM, then 6-point for climate resilience statement? Using similar scales with similar structures is not really necessary, but it will probably make your life easier.
Thank you very much, sir! I appreciate your response. I am having sample size and want to compare the reasons of visit to a fast food outlet. I have taken 10 reasons e. I have collected the data on a 5 point likert scale with 1 as never, 2 as rarely, 3 as sometimes, 4 as often and 5 as very often. I should compare means or mean ranks of the 10 reason to visit a fast food outlet. Your supervisor may be a more appropriate person to seek advice from. They may also be able to advise you with the pragmatics or asking for assistance.
Good luck with your project. I am so glad to have found your blog and have spent all of my Saturday night reading it : You have helped so many people, I hope you can help me. I have data on an ordinal scale: 0, Never; 1, Rarely; 2, Sometimes; and 3 Often. Five questions ask variants of the same thing, and the scores are summed. The final score can have a value between 0 and Is it valid to divide by 5 to get the score back on the original scale?
If so, is this a form of normalization? Also, since we are dividing by N, would this be considered a mean? Thanks also for the kind comments! Hi [Dr] Kostoulas I have conducted a quantitative survey which entitled customers satisfaction survey by the office of the registrar of St.
All in all am trying to answer the average satisfaction level of the respondents in this aspect I prefer mean. How can I analyze? You should not use mean values averages with Likert-type questions.
You could either report the median value, if you need it, report each value separately, or group positives neutral and negative responses and report those. I have learnt so much from reading all your comments. Scholars working with the University of Manchester are usually amazing and very tolerant. I am not sure if your responses to the questions that were asked by two other persons on 26 March Is it theoretically acceptable for me to calculate and use the mean for the following 7-point scales that I used to collect survey data from 41 respondents across all government Ministries in a developing country?
Second, I intended using the above 7-point scale to produce interval-level data analysis rather than simply ordinal level data analysis. Does this 7-point scale pass the theoretical test of interval-level statistical analysis?
Thanks for your kind words, they are really appreciated. With regard to your first question, I am rather sceptical about using means, in this case, especially as the Likert format and the low number of respondents makes it unlikely that your responses are normally distributed. But medians are a good alternative. But, I am not sure this is a warranted assumption, so again, it may be best to take the safe option.
Hope that helps and good luck with your project. Which method should I use to present the Mean of a 5-point Likert scale? Afterwards, number one which is the least value in the scale was added in order to identify the maximum of this cell. The length of the cells is determined below:. From 1 to 1. From 1. From 2. From until represents agree. From until represents strongly agree. My questions are: 1 Which method should I use to present findings?
Many people, including myself, would argue that this is an abuse of statistics. To avoid this, it is usually safer to calculate the median, not the mean, of the data. Hello Dr Kostoulas! Congratulations for your good work helping people. I would like to ask you a question about my data. That rubric consists of 4 questions that measure different aspects of the same skill. That calculation would be a violation of the things we can do with ordinal data? The statistical test to conduct would be a Friedman Test for ordinal data or an Anova for repeated measures continuous variables?
Does it make sense? Hi Giovanni, Thanks for your kind words, they are much appreciated! About your questions: 1 Strictly speaking, your rubric still produces ordinal data. Just to be on the safe side :. Starting with a value of 0 would be more intuitive, but involves unnecessary work… either way, make sure you explain what you did in the methods section, and maybe add some reminders when you are describing the results.
Dr Kostoulas, thank you very much! I really appreciate your help so much. Thank you so much. But, like I said, a Friedman test might be a safer choice. Thank you again, Dr Kostoulas! One last question and I leave you and your topic alone! No worries!
One way to approach this is to take a look at the assumptions for each test, and see which one fits the data best. Depending on how much space you have, you might write a paragraph or two comparing the methods, and saying which one makes more sense for your data. Does that make any sense? Is there another formula that should be used? Yes, in most cases the formula for calculating a weighted average is not the best way forward. A safer way to proceed with this kind of data would be to calculate the median.
In your opinion, is it possible to analyse it as explained on the following:. To sum up a questionnaire score for each respondent to receive his overall questionnaire score. Hi there, I have a question in regards to the mean of a Likert-Scale. I use 5 questions in regards to Intrinsic motivation to recycle.
Since the questions are connected to 1 concept, is it possible to use the mean? To me this makes a lot of sense that an individual receives for example a score of 3,4 on intrinsic motivation.
However, you probably need to run a Cronbach alpha test to make sure that the scale is internally consistent, i. Thank you for your very quick reply!
But thank you for the confirmation. Hi Sir, I have conducted a research […] and I have 5 questions under each independent variable. Is there a connection between mean and the bar graph percentage and can I link the two? Some of the other means are over 3. I feel like your the correct person to ask this. Thanks for your question.
It looks like you are doing some interesting work, but maybe the statistics are somewhat above your current level of competence. I think that what you should do, under the circumstances, is forget about the mean altogether. Besides, as you will read in the blog post above, and in many statistics manuals, calculating the mean for Likert scales is dangerous statistical territory. What you can do is describe the distribution of answers for every question, by showing the bar chart, and a table with the absolute number and percentage for each response option.
If you are absolutely sure that the questions under each independent variable are measuring the same construct, then you can also add up the responses, and present the combined data for each independent variable.
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed. Likert scales and ordinal data What are Likert scales? Apples are rubbish 1 2 3 4 5 b. Yoghurt is my favourite food 1 2 3 4 5 c.
Fish fingers and custard taste great 1 2 3 4 5 Each of these items measures a variable , i. When you compute the arithmetic mean, you treat the numbers as if the differences between them were equal. But that's a pretty strong assumption with ordinal data and you would have to justify it.
I agree with the concept that arithmetic mean cannot be truly justified in ordinal scale data. Instead of calculating mean we can use mode or median in such situations which can give us more meaningful interpretation of our results. Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group.
Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. Calculate mean of ordinal variable Ask Question. Asked 8 years, 2 months ago. Active 2 years ago. Viewed 36k times. Improve this question. Nick Cox With ordinal data - even when its categories are labelled "1","2","3","4" - this is quite explicitly not necessarily the case.
Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. However, ordinal data not being normally distributed is not a valid reason, because the mean is widely used for non-normal distributions well-defined mathematically for very many non-normal distributions, except in some pathological cases.
Improve this answer. Nick Cox Nick Cox For example if we have two GPAs, say 4. Please find below some common questions that are asked regarding measures of central tendency, along with their answers.
These FAQs are in addition to our article on measures of central tendency found on the previous page. There can often be a "best" measure of central tendency with regards to the data you are analysing, but there is no one "best" measure of central tendency.
Further considerations of when to use each measure of central tendency is found in our guide on the previous page. It is usually inappropriate to use the mean in such situations where your data is skewed. You would normally choose the median or mode, with the median usually preferred. This is discussed on the previous page under the subtitle, "When not to use the mean". Yes and no.
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