Your textbook notes that scales (e.g. Likert-type scales) are often treated as interval scales in applied statistics for the psychological and social sciences. This is true—but, as noted in the webtext, it is an area of debate even among those who do statistics regularly in these areas. We will, on occasion and for instructional purposes, follow this practice; however, for this assignment we want you to provide the most technically correct responses for all of these items rather than indicating how data might be treated in practice. 

In this webtext, you’ve learned that as scales of measurement become more numeric in nature, you have more options for measures of central tendency and variability because you can perform more mathematical operations. As you respond to the prompts on this page, we would like you to select the measures of central tendency or variability that require the most mathematical computation that is reasonable to report, given the scale of measurement. 

For example, if your data were interval or ratio, you could report a mode, a median, or a mean, but the mean would be the measure of central tendency requiring the most mathematical computation. Thus, we would want you to report “Mean” as the answer for a variable measured on such a scale.