What is nominal, ordinal, continuous and discrete data, and how can I identify which is which?

Answer 1

Nominal is non-quantitative, such a gender, male & female, or colors: red, blue and green. These categories have no order

Ordinal means the data have an order, such as rankings, who came in first 2nd 3rd, ..

continuous is like temperature, where the actual measurement does not jump from one

degree to another, but moves continuously through every fractional part of a degree

discrete is like integers or whole numbers, which make a quantum leap from 1 to 2 to 3.... and never include data in between. There are no fractions in the data.