Question

Students in an introductory statistics course were asked the following questions as part of a class survey:(1) What is your gender, male or female?(2) On average, how many hours of sleep do you get per night?(3) What is your bedtime: 8pm-10pm, 10pm-12am, 12am-2am, later than 2am?(4) How many countries have you visited?(5) On a scale of 1 (very little) - 5 (a lot), how much do you dread this semester? Identify the variables in the survey. Classify each variable as numerical or categorical. For each numerical variable, identify whether it is continuous or discrete. For each categorical variable, identify whether it is nominal or ordinal.

Answer 1

Answers:

Gender = categorical, nominal variable

Sleep length = numerical, continuous

Bedtime = categorical, ordinal

Number of countries visited = numerical, discrete

Scale of dreading semester = categorical, ordinal

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Explanation:

Gender is categorical because there are two categories or labels, male or female. It is nominal because we simply attach names to each label and we can't sort them or order them from highest to lowest. There is no ranking for gender.

Sleep length is numerical as it deals with numbers. I put continuous because someone could write 2.5 hours or 3.75 hours. If whole numbers are only allowed, then the variable would be discrete.

The bedtime portion is categorical as each time slot is a category. Like with the first part, they are simply labels. We can order them however from earliest to later on, which is why this variable is ordinal.

The number of countries visited is numeric as expected, and it's also discrete because we can't visit 0.1 of a country. By "visit", I mean step foot in any part of the country for any length of time. It does not mean you have to explore every square inch of the territory.

The last part is categorical and ordinal. The scale ranking is ordered for us from 1 to 5. Despite the fact we have numbers here, the data is not numerical as the numbers 1 through 5 represent labels of "very little" through "a lot".