ABSTRACT
This chapter helps people to: identify the different scales of measurement used in survey research; understand when to use the appropriate measuring instrument in survey research. Reliability is the degree of consistency in measuring survey responses, provided that there are no changes in the characteristic being measured. The measure has validity if the researcher decides that the concept is being measured more than any other concept. Ordinal scales of measurement provide an order of attributes or characteristics. Ordinal data report the order or rank of responses from the smallest to the greatest, best to the worst, or first to last. A ratio scale of measurement is very similar to the interval scale of measurement, and some researchers even label both interval and ratio scales of measurement as continuous scales. Researchers typically construct two forms of questions. One form is the open-ended question and the other is the closed-ended question.
