Measuring scales

One of the important principles to understand about measurement is that there are different kinds of measuring scales. And what you can do with a particular set of measurements will depend on what kind of measurement scale is involved.

For example, you can compare two lengths (say, a = 6 metres and b = 2 metres) by their ratio (a is 3 times longer than b). So, 'length' is what is called a ratio scale. One of the features of a ratio scale is that 0 represents 'nothing'. So, '0 metres' is no length at all.

Temperature measured in degrees celsius is not therefore a ratio scale, because '0 degrees' does not represent 'no temperature at all'. So, you could not compare, say, a temperature of 12 degrees with one of 4 degrees, by saying that the the first one is three times hotter! To compare these you could only use the difference in temperature: the first is 8 degrees hotter than the second. This is an example of an interval scale.

A more primitive type of measurement, often met in everyday life, is an ordinal scale. Essentially all this does is to put various entities into order, according to some criteria.

An interesting example of the misuse of an ordinal scale is provided by the Amazon customer reviews for a book. To give a book 3 stars means simply that it is judged better than 2 but not as good as 3, by whatever criteria the reviewer is using.

The thing to note is that you cannot do arithmetic with ordinal scales. You cannot say that a 4-star rating is twice as good as a 2-star rating; or even that the difference between a 2-star rating and a 3-star rating is in some sense 'the same size' as the difference between a 3-star rating and a 4-star rating! So, you definitely cannot add up all the customer ratings and divide by the number of them to calculate an average rating (i.e. the arithmetic mean). That could only be done if the interval between various ratings represented the same amount of something! If there was something that could be measured that we could call, say, a 'unit of worth', so that 1 star meant 1 unit of worth, and 2 stars meant 2 units of worth, and so on, and 0 stars meant 'absolutely worthless', then we would have a ratio scale and we could merrily calculate averages and so on. But customer ratings are not like that!

I mention this because I noticed that my book, Mathematics Explained for Primary Teachers, is given an average rating of what looks like four and a half stars. This is the result of doing some arithmetic with 21 five-star reviews, 3 four-star, 1 three-star and 1 one-star. [This 1-star reviewer wrote 'not fore parents' (sic).] If you were to treat these as measurements on a ratio scale, the arithmetic mean would be 4.65, which appears in an icon as 4.5 stars.

But, as explained above, you cannot do arithmetic with an ordinal scale, so the use of the arithmetic mean is unacceptable to find an average. What you could use for an average ranking is either the median or the mode, since these require nothing more than putting items in order or putting them into a set number of categories.

If you use the median as an average you line up all the reviews from the lowest to the highest and choose the one in the middle to represent the whole set. In this case the median value is 5 stars!

If you use the mode then you just select the most commonly occurring grade: which again is 5 stars.

So, clearly, if the maths is done appropriately, using either of the legitimate averages for ordinal measurements (median or mode), then my book should get an average ranking of 5 stars! I rest my case.