Définition Nominal scale

Nominal scales correspond to the lowest level of measurement and are used to represent and classify qualitative characteristics of attributes.

Examples include variables such as gender or nationality. Within nominal scales, we can only count different variables and depict their frequency. The only available location parameter is the mode. Neither can a median be identified, nor can we calculate an arithmetic mean.

Qualitative questions which can be divided into ranks (e.g. better/worse, bigger/smaller) are accounted for among the ordinal scales.