Nominal scale gender example – UGC NET Question

A nominal scale involves categorising observations into distinct groups that have no inherent order, such as gender, religion or blood type. The categories are mutually exclusive and exhaustive but cannot be ranked meaningfully. Only counts and mode are appropriate descriptive measures. Therefore, classifying respondents by gender uses a nominal scale.

Option A:
Nominal measurement simply names or labels categories without implying that one category is greater or less than another. In the gender example, categories like male, female or other do not fall into a natural order, confirming that the scale is nominal and making this option correct.

Option B:
An ordinal scale ranks categories in terms of order, such as low, medium and high, but does not guarantee equal intervals; this is not what is happening in simple gender classification.

Option C:
Interval scales have equal intervals and allow meaningful differences, as in temperature measured in degrees, but do not apply to purely categorical variables like gender.

Option D:
Ratio scales add a true zero point and support meaningful ratios, such as weight or height; these properties are irrelevant to categorising gender, so ratio is not the correct answer.