1. a. Differentiate between nominal, ordinal, interval and ratio scales, with an example of each.

A categorical variable, also called a nominal variable, is for mutual exclusive, but not ordered, categories. For example, your study might compare five different genotypes. You can code the five genotypes with numbers if you want, but the order is arbitrary and any calculations (for example, computing an average) would be meaningless. A ordinal variable, is one where the order matters but not the difference between values. For example, you might ask patients to express the amount of pain they are feeling on a scale of 1 to 10. A score of 7 means more pain that a score of 5, and that is more than a score of 3. But the difference between the 7 and the 5 may not be the same as that between 5 and 3. The values simply express an order. Another example would be movie ratings, from * to *****. A interval variable is a measurement where the difference between two values is meaningful. The difference between a temperature of 100 degrees and 90 degrees is the same difference as between 90 degrees and 80 degrees. A ratio variable, has all the properties of an interval variable, and also has a clear definition of 0.0. When the variable equals 0.0, there is none of that variable. Variables like height, weight, enzyme activity are ratio variables. Temperature, expressed in F or C, is not a ratio variable. A temperature of 0.0 on either of those scales does not mean 'no temperature'. However, temperature in degrees Kelvin in a ratio variable, as 0.0 degrees Kelvin really does mean 'no temperature'. Another counter example is pH. It is not a ratio variable, as pH=0 just means 1 molar of H+. and the definition of molar is fairly arbitrary. A pH of 0.0 does not mean 'no acidity' (quite the opposite!). When working with ratio variables, but not interval variables, you can look at the ratio of two measurements. A weight of 4 grams is twice a weight of 2 grams, because weight is a ratio variable. A temperature of 100 degrees C is not twice as hot as 50 degrees C, because temperature C is not a ratio variable. A pH of 3 is not twice as acidic as a pH of 6, because pH is not a ratio variable.

OK to compute....

Nominal Ordinal Interval Ratio Yes No No No Yes Yes No No No Yes Yes Yes Yes No Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes

frequency distribution. median and percentiles. add or subtract. ratio, or coefficient of variation.

mean, standard deviation, standard error of the mean. No

You might have heard of the sequence of terms to describe data : Nominal, Ordinal, Interval and Ratio. They were used quite extensively but have begun to fall out of favor. These terms are used to describe types of data and by some to dictate the appropriate statistical test to use. Most statistical text books still use this hierarchy so students generally end up needing to know them.

Nominal basically refers to categorically discrete data such as name of your school, type of car you drive or name of a book. This one is easy to remember because nominal sounds like name (they have the same Latin root). Ordinal refers to quantities that have a natural ordering. The ranking of favorite sports, the order of people's place in a line, the order of runners finishing a race or more often the choice on a rating scale from 1 to 5. With ordinal data you cannot state with certainty whether the intervals between each value are equal. For example, we often using rating scales (Likert questions). On a 10 point scale, the difference between a 9 and a 10 is not necessarily the same difference as the difference between a 6 and a 7. This is also an easy one to remember, ordinal sounds like order. Interval data is like ordinal except we can say the intervals between each value are equally split. The most common example is temperature in degrees Fahrenheit. The difference between 29 and 30 degrees is the same magnitude as the difference between 78 and 79 (although I know I prefer the latter). With attitudinal scales and the Likert questions you usually see on a survey, these are rarely interval, although many points on the scale likely are of equal intervals. Ratio data is interval data with a natural zero point. For example, time is ratio since 0 time is meaningful. Degrees Kelvin has a 0 point (absolute 0) and the steps in both these scales have the same degree of magnitude.

Nominal scales
This, the crudest of measurement scales, classifies individuals, companies, products, brands or other entities into categories where no order is implied. Indeed it is often referred to as a categorical scale. It is a system of classification and does not place the entity along a continuum. It involves a simply count of the frequency of the cases assigned to the various categories, and if desired numbers can be nominally assigned to label each category as in the example below: Figure 3.1 An example of a nominal scale

Which of the following food items do you tend to buy at least once per month? (Please tick) Okra Palm Oil Milled Rice Peppers Prawns Pasteurised milk
The numbers have no arithmetic properties and act only as labels. The only measure of average which can be used is the mode because this is simply a set of frequency counts. Hypothesis tests can be carried out on data collected in the nominal form. The most likely would be the Chi-square test. However, it should be noted that the Chi-square is a test to determine whether two or more variables are associated and the strength of that relationship. It can tell nothing about the form of that relationship, where it exists, i.e. it is not capable of establishing cause and effect. Ordinal scales Ordinal scales involve the ranking of individuals, attitudes or items along the continuum of the characteristic being scaled. For example, if a researcher asked farmers to rank 5 brands of pesticide in order of preference he/she might obtain responses like those in table 3.2 below. Figure 3.2 An example of an ordinal scale used to determine farmers' preferences among 5 brands of pesticide.

Order of preference 1 2 3 4 5

Brand Rambo R.I.P. Killalot D.O.A. Bugdeath

From such a table the researcher knows the order of preference but nothing about how much more one brand is preferred to another, that is there is no information about the interval between any two brands. All of the information a nominal scale would have given is available from an ordinal scale. In addition, positional statistics such as the median, quartile and percentile can be determined. It is possible to test for order correlation with ranked data. The two main methods are Spearman's Ranked Correlation Coefficient and Kendall's Coefficient of Concordance. Using either procedure one can, for example, ascertain the degree to which two or more survey respondents agree in their ranking of a set of items. Consider again the ranking of pesticides example in figure 3.2. The researcher might wish to measure similarities and differences in the rankings of pesticide brands according to whether the respondents' farm enterprises were classified as "arable" or "mixed" (a combination of crops and livestock). The resultant coefficient takes a value in the range 0 to 1. A zero would mean that there was no agreement between the two groups, and 1 would indicate total agreement. It is more likely that an answer somewhere between these two extremes would be found. The only other permissible hypothesis testing procedures are the runs test and sign test. The runs test (also known as the Wald-Wolfowitz). Test is used to determine whether a sequence of binomial data - meaning it can take only one of two possible values e.g. African/nonAfrican, yes/no, male/female - is random or contains systematic 'runs' of one or other value. Sign tests are employed when the objective is to determine whether there is a significant difference between matched pairs of data. The sign test tells the analyst if the number of positive differences in ranking is approximately equal to the number of negative rankings, in which case the distribution of rankings is random, i.e. apparent differences are not significant. The test takes into account only the direction of differences and ignores their magnitude and hence it is compatible with ordinal data. Interval scales It is only with an interval scaled data that researchers can justify the use of the arithmetic mean as the measure of average. The interval or cardinal scale has equal units of measurement, thus making it possible to interpret not only the order of scale scores but also the distance between them. However, it must be recognised that the zero point on an interval scale is arbitrary and is not a true zero. This of course has implications for the type of data manipulation and analysis we can carry out on data collected in this form. It is possible to add or subtract a

constant to all of the scale values without affecting the form of the scale but one cannot multiply or divide the values. It can be said that two respondents with scale positions 1 and 2 are as far apart as two respondents with scale positions 4 and 5, but not that a person with score 10 feels twice as strongly as one with score 5. Temperature is interval scaled, being measured either in Centigrade or Fahrenheit. We cannot speak of 50F being twice as hot as 25F since the corresponding temperatures on the centigrade scale, 10C and -3.9C, are not in the ratio 2:1. Interval scales may be either numeric or semantic. Study the examples below in figure 3.3. Figure 3.3 Examples of interval scales in numeric and semantic formats

Please indicate your views on Balkan Olives by scoring them on a scale of 5 down to 1 (i.e. 5 = Excellent; = Poor) on each of the criteria listed Balkan Olives are: Circle the appropriate score on each line Succulence 5 4 3 2 1 Fresh tasting 5 4 3 2 1 Free of skin blemish 5 4 3 2 1 Good value 5 4 3 2 1 Attractively packaged 5 4 3 2 1 (a) Please indicate your views on Balkan Olives by ticking the appropriate responses below: Excellent Very Good Good Fair Poor Succulent Freshness Freedom from skin blemish Value for money Attractiveness of packaging (b)
Most of the common statistical methods of analysis require only interval scales in order that they might be used. These are not recounted here because they are so common and can be found in virtually all basic texts on statistics. Ratio scales The highest level of measurement is a ratio scale. This has the properties of an interval scale together with a fixed origin or zero point. Examples of variables which are ratio scaled include weights, lengths and times. Ratio scales permit the researcher to compare both differences in scores and the relative magnitude of scores. For instance the difference between 5 and 10 minutes is the same as that between 10 and 15 minutes, and 10 minutes is twice as long as 5 minutes. Given that sociological and management research seldom aspires beyond the interval level of measurement, it is not proposed that particular attention be given to this level of analysis. Suffice it to say that virtually all statistical operations can be performed on ratio scales.

b. What are the purposes of measurement in social science research?

Although his work in the field of psychophysics is very well known and has been influential, S.S. Stevens is perhaps best known because of his paper On the theory of scales of

measurement (1946). In it, he defines four hierarchical scales of measurement based on the kinds of mathematical transformations that are allowable under each. The four types are: nominal (N), ordinal (O), interval (I) and ratio (R). The accompanying table shows the scales, permissible transformations and examples of each (Stevens, 1975).

That there are in fact different levels or types of measurement is a point about which there is no quarrel. The problem is the prescriptive language used by Stevens (1951) about what statistics could be used to describe or analyze the data collected as a function of the level of measurement of the tool used to collect it. For example, when one has what he called nominal level measurement, analyses according to Stevens must be limited to statistics such as the mode, and contingency coefficient. Statistics that are permissible for ordinal scales include the median and rank order correlations--statistics whose meanings are preserved when monotonictransformations are applied to the data. Interval level scales allow one to compute means, standard deviations and Pearson product moment correlationsstatistics whose meanings are unchanged when linear transformations are applied to the data. The availability of ratio level data also allows the computation of geometric means and coefficients of variation, both of which are unchanged by rescaling ones data. Importantly, there is cumulativeness to the operations that can be done as one moves up the levels of measurement hierarchy. That is, one can do operations on ordinal data that are permissible for nominal data. In turn any operations permissible for ordinal level data are also permissible for use with interval data, and so on. There have been several scathing critiques of the Stevens dicta about what statistics can and

cannot be computed because of the level of measurement of ones scales. I especially recommend Paul Velleman and Leland Wilkinsons review article Nominal, Ordinal, Interval, and Ratio Typologies are Misleading in The American Statistician (Velleman and Wilkinson, 1993). 10 The earliest attack appears to have been made by Fredrick Lord (1953) in which he argues that the choice of an appropriate statistic depends upon the meaningfulness of the statistical analysis taken and not the level of measurement of ones scales. John Tukey (1961) agreed with Lord and further argued about the importance of the meaning of the data in making a decision about what which statistical analyses are appropriate. Furthermore, he argues that just because Stevens scale types are absolute doesnt mean that the statistical methods must be absolute as well. In a similar vein Baker, Hardyck, and Petrinovich (1966) and Borgatta and Bohrnstedt (1980) argue that much of the statistical power of parametric statistics is lost when one uses rank order statistics on types of measures typically used in the social sciences. Borgatta and Bohrnstedt (1980) further argue that in most cases the underlying variable of interest is a continuous one where equal intervals are assumed and the fact that one does not measure it at the interval level only means that one is measuring with error. Abelson and Tukey (1959) make a similar argument. Guttman (1977) makes the more general point that the use of statistical techniques hinges on the kinds of questions asked of the data at hand and on the kind of statistical evidence one would accept to inform us about those questions. He argues that one should try to minimize a loss function. Duncan (1984) has many criticisms of Stevens approach to scales of measurement, but perhaps the most devastating one is Stevens use of the term nominal scale. He sees that much of what Stevens refers to at the nominal level is not measurement at all but mere labeling in some cases and classification in others. He goes on to make the point that many dichotomous variables

(which would be viewed as nominal by Stevens) have an important place in measurement and conditions such as present versus absent or on versus off are important examples of this. Other examples include the dummy coding of variables such as religious identification (e.g., Catholic or not) and political party identification (e.g., Republican or not). Duncan (1984, p.122126) also takes strong issue with Stevens definition of measurement which is the assignment of numbers to objects or event according to rules (Stevens, 1946). Drawing on Cohen and Nagel (1934. p.294) Duncan states: Measurement is not only the assignment of numerals, etc. It is also the assignment of numerals in such a way as to correspond to different degrees of a quality or property of some object or event. Duncan goes on to state: the purpose of measurement is to quantify and notes that for the philosopher Bunge (1973, p.108) To quantifyis to introduce a functional correspondence between the degrees of a property and a number. That is, the assignment of numbers should represent a functional relationship between the numbers and the degree to which some object or phenomenon possesses some quality or characteristic. That is, measurement involves magnitude.

2. a. What are the sources from which one may be able to identify research problems?
((Where do research topics come from?))

So how do researchers come up with the idea for a research project? Probably one of the most common sources of research ideas is the

experience of practical problems in the field. Many researchers are directly engaged in social, health or human service program implementation and come up with their ideas based on what they see happening around them. Others aren't directly involved in service contexts, but work with (or survey) people who are in order to learn what needs to be better understood. Many of the ideas would strike the outsider as silly or worse. For instance, in health services areas, there is great interest in the problem of back injuries among nursing staff. It's not necessarily the thing that comes first to mind when we think about the health care field. But if you reflect on it for a minute longer, it should be obvious that nurses and nursing staff do an awful lot of lifting in performing their jobs. They lift and push heavy equipment, and they lift and push oftentimes heavy patients! If 5 or 10 out of every hundred nursing staff were to strain their backs on average over the period of one year, the costs would be enormous -- and that's pretty much what's happening. Even minor injuries can result in increased absenteeism. Major ones can result in lost jobs and expensive medical bills. The nursing industry figures that this is a problem that costs tens of millions of dollars annually in increased health care. And, the health care industry has developed a number of approaches, many of them educational, to try to reduce the scope and cost of the problem. So, even though it might seem silly at first, many of these practical problems that arise in practice can lead to extensive research efforts. Another source for research ideas is the literature in your specific field. Certainly, many researchers get ideas for research by reading the literature and thinking of ways to extend or refine previous research. Another type of literature that acts as a source of good research ideas is the Requests For Proposals (RFPs) that are published by government agencies and some companies. These RFPs describe some problem that the agency would like researchers to address -- they are virtually handing the researcher an idea! Typically, the RFP describes the problem that needs addressing, the contexts in which it operates, the approach they would like you to take to investigate to address the

problem, and the amount they would be willing to pay for such research. Clearly, there's nothing like potential research funding to get researchers to focus on a particular research topic. And let's not forget the fact that many researchers simply think up their research topic on their own. Of course, no one lives in a vacuum, so we would expect that the ideas you come up with on your own are influenced by your background, culture, education and experiences.
((Is the study feasible?))

Very soon after you get an idea for a study reality begins to kick in and you begin to think about whether the study is feasible at all. There are several major considerations that come into play. Many of these involve making tradeoffs between rigor and practicality. To do a study well from a scientific point of view may force you to do things you wouldn't do normally. You may have to control the implementation of your program more carefully than you otherwise might. Or, you may have to ask program participants lots of questions that you usually wouldn't if you weren't doing research. If you had unlimited resources and unbridled control over the circumstances, you would always be able to do the best quality research. But those ideal circumstances seldom exist, and researchers are almost always forced to look for the best tradeoffs they can find in order to get the rigor they desire. There are several practical considerations that almost always need to be considered when deciding on thefeasibility of a research project. First, you have to think about how long the research will take to accomplish. Second, you have to question whether there are important ethical constraints that need consideration. Third, can you achieve the needed cooperation to take the project to its successful conclusion. And fourth, how significant are the costs of conducting the research. Failure to consider any of these factors can mean disaster later.

1. Follow this general procedure when identifying and defining a problem situation: Start with a simple statement of the problem situation. Add details as you review the literature, review theoretical concepts, and investigate the problem in greater depth. Simplify the focus by identifying the most important aspects of the problem that are researchable. 2. Make a first attempt at identifying the problem situation by using the following format: Problem Situation: Write a small, simple paragraph that identifies the problem. Discrepancy: State the discrepancy between what is and what should be. Problem Question: Write down the central problem question. Possible Answers: Write two or more plausible answers to the problem question. 3. From available research literature, health and behavioral theory, current service statistics, educated opinions, the assistance of PLHA, and other sources of information, try to add details to the problem situation you have just identified. Look for theoretical concepts and

operational variables that you may have missed. List these concepts and variables on a piece of paper as you come across them. Try to answer the following questions: What To Do: Problem Identification and Definition What are the incidence and prevalence of the problem? Which geographic areas are affected by the problem? Which population groups are affected by the problem? What are the findings of other research studies? What has been done to overcome the problem in the past? How successful were past efforts to overcome the problem? What seem to be major unanswered questions about the problem? 4. With the information you have collected from a literature review and other sources, rewrite your statement identifying and defining the problem. Use the format described above: Problem Situation, Discrepancy, Problem Question, and Possible Answers. Add details

that help to define the problem, but organize the information. Try to establish the boundaries of the problem. Focus your attention on the most important, researchable aspects of the problem. 5. Have one or more colleagues read your final statement identifying and defining the problem situation. Have them tell you what he or she thinks the problem is. If they are unclear about the problem situation or cannot describe the discrepancy between what is and what should be, then go back to the beginning and start all over again.

b. Why literature survey is important in research?

The Literature Review

One of the most important early steps in a research project is the conducting of the literature review. This is also one of the most humbling experiences you're likely to have. Why? Because you're likely to find out that just about any worthwhile idea you will have has been thought of before, at least to some degree. Every time I teach a research methods course, I have at least one student come to me complaining that they couldn't find anything in the literature that was related to their topic. And virtually every time they have said that, I was able to show them that was only true because they only looked for articles that were exactly the same as their research topic. A literature review is designed to identify related research, to set the current research project within a conceptual and theoretical context. When looked at that way, there is almost no

topic that is so new or unique that we can't locate relevant and informative related research. Some tips about conducting the literature review. First, concentrate your efforts on the scientific literature. Try to determine what the most credible research journals are in your topical area and start with those. Put the greatest emphasis on research journals that use a blind review system. In a blind review, authors submit potential articles to a journal editor who solicits several reviewers who agree to give a critical review of the paper. The paper is sent to these reviewers with no identification of the author so that there will be no personal bias (either for or against the author). Based on the reviewers' recommendations, the editor can accept the article, reject it, or recommend that the author revise and resubmit it. Articles in journals with blind review processes can be expected to have a fairly high level of credibility. Second, do the review early in the research process. You are likely to learn a lot in the literature review that will help you in making the tradeoffs you'll need to face. After all, previous researchers also had to face tradeoff decisions. What should you look for in the literature review? First, you might be able to find a study that is quite similar to the one you are thinking of doing. Since all credible research studies have to review the literature themselves, you can check their literature review to get a quick-start on your own. Second, prior research will help assure that you include all of the major relevant constructs in your study. You may find that other similar studies routinely look at an outcome that you might not have included. If you did your study without that construct, it would not be judged credible if it ignored a major construct. Third, the literature review will help you to find and select appropriate measurement instruments. You will readily see what measurement instruments researchers use themselves in contexts similar to yours. Finally, the literature review will help you to anticipate common problems in your research context. You can use the prior experiences of other to avoid common traps and pitfalls.