categorical scale

a sequence of numbers that identifies items as belonging to mutually exclusive categories. For example, a categorical scale for the political party affiliation of a group of Americans might use 1 to denote Republican, 2 to denote Democrat, and 3 to denote Independent. When the number sequence has a meaningful order a categorical scale is more precisely called an ordinal scale; when it is devoid of such meaningful order it is known as a nominal scale.

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Psychology term of the day

January 14th 2025

Kruskal–Shepard scaling

a type of multidimensional scaling applied to judgments of similarity or dissimilarity for pairs of items (e.g., cities). The dissimilarities are represented by distances between items in a highly dimensional space: Larger distances indicate greater dissimilarity. [William Henry Kruskal (1919–2005), U.S. statistician; Roger N. Shepard (1929– ), U.S. experimental and cognitive psychologist]