ABSTRACT
The need to define measurements, even if they are ordinal, is derived from the very nature of certain concepts. The very notions of social status, of anomie, or of the level of schooling imply that it might be possible to organize social status into a hierarchy and distinguish the levels of anomie or lower or higher levels of schooling. There is little point, therefore, in debating abstractly the possibility and utility of measurement in the social sciences in general and in sociology in particular. If it is true that the questions that the sociologist asks do not involve all
the problems of measurement, it is equally true that some of these questions may involve some unavoidable measurement problems.
