Which level of measurement uses numbers solely to label categories with no quantitative meaning?

• A. Interval
• B. Nominal
• C. Ordinal
• D. Ratio

Answer: (B)

Numbers used purely as labels identify categories without implying amount or order. This is the nominal level of measurement: data are categories that can be named and counted, but the labels themselves don’t carry quantitative meaning. For example, coding eye color as 1 for blue, 2 for brown, 3 for green is just to identify categories; there’s no sense in which 2 is more or less than 1. You can tally how many fall into each category and use analyses that compare frequencies, but you can’t compute a meaningful average or difference between categories. In contrast, ordinal data carry an order (like small, medium, large) without equal steps; interval data have equal distances between values but no true zero; ratio data have a true zero and meaningful ratios.