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I designed a questionnaire regarding teacher readiness to conduct / perform certain tasks other than teaching in the classroom. One of the items included is the period of service of the teacher. Here is what the item looks like:

  1. Period of service:

    less than 1 year (1)
    1 - 5 years (2)
    6 - 10 years (3)
    more than 10 yrs (4)

The left is the code which I used in SPSS. I am confused about which level of measurement should be used in SPSS, ordinal or nominal?

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2 Answers 2

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It's clearly at least ordinal; where possible you should avoid treating ordinal as nominal.

If you're prepared to assume (or somehow calculate) the typical values in each category to use as scores (like the average service duration for people in each band) you could try to treat it as interval.

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The four levels have a definite order that matters, so the variable is ordinal.

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