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You are a health care administrator, interested in collecting demographic inform

ID: 3044707 • Letter: Y

Question

You are a health care administrator, interested in collecting demographic information about your patient population in order to find out whether you are adequately serving low-income people in your community hospital, comparing your own patient data to larger population-based surveys. You find that when you ask patients directly about their income, they usually refuse to answer, but when you ask whether their income is from 0-$20,000, $21,000 - $50,000, or above $50,000, they are more willing to give that information. Of the four types of variables, what kind of variable results from this type of question?

Explanation / Answer

Answer:

You are a health care administrator, interested in collecting demographic information about your patient population in order to find out whether you are adequately serving low-income people in your community hospital, comparing your own patient data to larger population-based surveys. You find that when you ask patients directly about their income, they usually refuse to answer, but when you ask whether their income is from 0-$20,000, $21,000 - $50,000, or above $50,000, they are more willing to give that information. Of the four types of variables, what kind of variable results from this type of question?

This is ordinal level variable.

Note: In ordinal level measurement, data that can be assigned to categories of numerical rank; that the intervals between the ranked categories may not be equal. This level of measurement depicts some ordered relationship among the variable’s observations.