ordinance

(noun)

a local law or regulation.

Related Terms

Examples of ordinance in the following topics:

  • Collecting and Measuring Data

    • There are four main levels of measurement: nominal, ordinal, interval, and ratio.
    • There are four main levels of measurement used in statistics: nominal, ordinal, interval, and ratio.
    • Examples of ordinal data include dichotomous values such as "sick" versus "healthy" when measuring health, "guilty" versus "innocent" when making judgments in courts, "false" versus "true", when measuring truth value.
    • Because variables conforming only to nominal or ordinal measurements cannot be reasonably measured numerically, sometimes they are grouped together as categorical variables, whereas ratio and interval measurements are grouped together as quantitative variables, which can be either discrete or continuous, due to their numerical nature.
    • Distinguish between the nominal, ordinal, interval and ratio methods of data measurement.

  • Types of Variables

    • Categorical variables may be further described as ordinal or nominal.
    • An ordinal variable is a categorical variable.
    • The categories associated with ordinal variables can be ranked higher or lower than another, but do not necessarily establish a numeric difference between each category.
    • Variables can be numeric or categorial, being further broken down in continuous and discrete, and nominal and ordinal variables.
    • Distinguish between quantitative and categorical, continuous and discrete, and ordinal and nominal variables.

  • Scales of measurement

    • It is useful, however, to further divide nominal measurement into binary and multi-category variations; it is also useful to distinguish between full-rank ordinal measures and grouped ordinal measures.
    • The types of ties can then be scaled into a single grouped ordinal measure of tie strength.
    • Grouped ordinal measures can be used to reflect a number of different quantitative aspects of relations.
    • Alternatively, ordinal data are sometimes treated as though they really were interval.
    • Most commonly, full rank ordinal measures are treated as if they were interval.

  • Introduction to kinds of graphs

    • Figure 3.2 is an example of a binary (as opposed to a signed or ordinal or valued) and directed (as opposed to a co-occurrence or co-presence or bonded-tie) graph.

  • Averages of Qualitative and Ranked Data

    • Stevens proposed his typology in a 1946 Science article entitled "On the Theory of Scales of Measurement. " In that article, Stevens claimed that all measurement in science was conducted using four different types of scales that he called "nominal", "ordinal", "interval" and "ratio", unifying both qualitative (which are described by his "nominal" type) and quantitative (to a different degree, all the rest of his scales).
    • The ordinal scale allows for rank order (1st, 2nd, 3rd, et cetera) by which data can be sorted, but still does not allow for relative degree of difference between them.
    • In 1946, Stevens observed that psychological measurement, such as measurement of opinions, usually operates on ordinal scales; thus means and standard deviations have no validity, but they can be used to get ideas for how to improve operationalization of variables used in questionnaires.
    • An opinion survey is an example of a non-dichotomous data set on the ordinal scale for which the central tendency can be described by the median or the mode.

  • Settlers and the West

    • This ordinance established the example that would become the basis for the Northwest Ordinance three years later.
    • As an organic act, the ordinance created a civil government in the territory under the direct jurisdiction of the Congress.
    • The ordinance was thus the prototype for the subsequent organic acts that created organized territories during the westward expansion of the United States.
    • The Natural Rights provisions of the ordinance foreshadowed the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the U.S.
    • The language of the ordinance prohibited slavery, but it did not emancipate the slaves already held by settlers in the territory.

  • Levels of measurement: Binary, signed, and valued graphs

    • Yet another approach would have been to ask: "rank the three people on this list in order of who you like most, next most, and least. " This would give us "rank order" or "ordinal" data describing the strength of each friendship choice.
    • With either an ordinal or valued graph, we would put the measure of the strength of the relationship on the arrow in the diagram.

  • Defining Utility

    • An example of a statement reflecting ordinal utility is that "I would rather read than watch television. " Generally, ordinal utility is the preferred method for gauging utility.

  • Summary

    • The strength of ties among actors in a graph may be nominal or binary (represents presence or absence of a tie); signed (represents a negative tie, a positive tie, or no tie); ordinal (represents whether the tie is the strongest, next strongest, etc.); or valued (measured on an interval or ratio level).

  • When to Use These Tests

    • "Ranking" refers to the data transformation in which numerical or ordinal values are replaced by their rank when the data are sorted.
    • In statistics, "ranking" refers to the data transformation in which numerical or ordinal values are replaced by their rank when the data are sorted.
    • In another example, the ordinal data hot, cold, warm would be replaced by 3, 1, 2.