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Ordinal
Ranked Preferences
We are often interested in preferences for different tastes, especially if we are planning a party. Let's say that we asked the three students pictured below to rank their preferences for four different sodas. We usually rank our strongest preference as "1". With four sodas, our lowest preference would be "4". For each soda, we assign a rank that tells us the order (magnitude) of the preference for that particular soda (identity). The number simply tells us that we prefer one soda over another, not "how much" more we prefer the soda.
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Because of the property of magnitude (or order), the numbers are no longer considered arbitrary as they are in nominal scales. If you asked students their preferences because you wanted to serve what they like best at a party, you would serve our first student Pepsi, our second student Sprite, and our third student Surge.
Let's change the numbers assigned to "Pepsi" and "Coke" for our first student.
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