Psychological Measurement Terms

noun a number denoting position in a series, such as first, second, third

adjective relating to or denoting a numerical order

• In mathematics, an ordinal number is used to describe the position or rank of an element in a sequence.
• The ordinal ranking of the students in the class was based on their GPA.
• I'm always last in line, I guess I have the 'ordinal' luck.
• His love for her was not just first or second, but of an ordinal nature that surpassed all others.

noun a statistic that measures the amount of variability or dispersion in a set of data points

• The standard deviation is a measure of the amount of variation or dispersion of a set of values.
• The standard deviation tells us how spread out the numbers in a data set are.
• The standard deviation is like the average distance of numbers from the mean.
• Think of standard deviation as a way to see how much the data points deviate from the average.