Use Of Measurement In Business Research
Measurement in Business Research
Some times some frequently used things of our lives produce great impact on our research and business decisions, just because of their importance factor changes according to the factor of where these are used. So how to cope these kind of difficulties in business research process? here comes the topic of "Measurement"
By definition it is a process which includes:
- Selection of distinct emperial or observable events
- Assigning numbers or symbols to these events
- Using mapping rule to convert these numbers or symbols with events
Business research some times deals with things which has varying scale and order of importance so new scales can be created created to meet the needs of research
Two things can be measured with in real life:
- Objects (People, Things, etc)
- Characteristics (Temprature, Color, Quantity, etc)
Measurement Scales
A tool or machnism by which individuals are distingushed on how they differ from one another
Tyes of measurement Scales
- Nominal Scale
As name says, a scale which can be used to nomiate only one entery in all the items it is applied. It has following characteristics:
- It only defins the classification of entity along the continum (horizontal or vertical graph scale)
- It counts the frequency of entities assigned to various categories
- It cannot establish cause and effect of relationship among same group items
- MODE (statistical tool) is a only tool to apply on the data collected by this scale
- Ordinal Scale
This scale has the ability to rank the individual attributes of to items in same group but unit of measurement is not available in this scale, like student A is taller than student B but their actual hights are not available. It has following characteristics:
- This scale tells nothing between two brands of thigs
- Spearman's Rank, co-relation, co-efficient and Cander's coefficient of concordance (Statistical Tools) are applicable on the data collected by this scale
- Cardinal Scale
This scale does the followings:
- Classifes Data into groups or categories
- Determins the preferences between items
- Definds the distances between two adjusent preferences which are always equal
- Zero point on the internal scale is abratrary zero, it is not the true zero point
- Ratio Scale
This is the higest level of measurement and has the properties of an internal scale; compled with fixed origion or zero point.
It clearly defines the magnitude or value of difference between two individual items or intervals in same groupd
Ratio scale variables are time, weigth and length, etc.
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