A researcher has numbered all 50 states from 1 to 50 and has calculated a mean of 17.43 for the variable "state of birth."
A) Since the variable is nominal, the mean makes no sense .
B) Since the variable is ordinal, we should treat the value of the mean with great caution.
C) The variable is interval-ratio and the mean is an appropriate and useful statistic in this case.
D) Since this variable is discrete, the mean should not be computed.

Question

Quizplus · Accepted Answer

The variable "state of birth" is nominal, meaning it categorizes data without a natural order or ranking. Calculating a mean for nominal data does not provide meaningful information because the numbers assigned to each state are arbitrary labels rather than values that can be meaningfully averaged.

A Researcher Has Numbered All 50 States from 1 to 50