ABSTRACT
This chapter sorts out kinds of precise quantification that are helpful in political research. Precision in measures corresponds roughly to colloquial use of the word precision, keeping the units of measurement relatively fine. There are basically three different ways to measure, each of which is qualitatively different from the others, in that it contains information not included in the others. The most primitive way to measure a variable is simply to assign the individuals being studied to categories of that variable. This is called nominal measurement. If, in addition to assigning categories, we can rank the categories according to how much of the variable they embody, we have achieved ordinal measurement. If units exist by which we can measure the intervals between scores like these, we have achieved interval measurement. This discussion of precision in measures and precision in measurement has centered on the work of quantifiers, simply because it was more convenient to introduce it in that way.
