Value

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A value is any of the possible levels of variability that a variable may achieve.

For example, the variable "temperature" may have values measured in degrees of heat, such as 0^o, 1^o, 2^o, etc, inlcuding negative values such as -1^o, -2^o, etc. On occasions, you may need smaller, more precise, values, such as 1.12^o, 1.13^o, 1.14^o; other times, you may well do with larger values, like categories, such as 0-9^o, 10-19^o, and so on. Also, depending on the scale used, the degrees may refer to Fahrenheit or Celsius. Of course, other possible values for heat may be categorical, like "very cold", "cold", "mild", etc.

Some researchers, however, use the concept value to refer only to the numerical expression of levels of variability, and, instead, use the concept attribute to refer to the verbal expression of such levels of variability.

For example, the variable "gender" would have two attributes: male and female (or men and woman, or boy and girl). These attributes would be considered as values whenever the attributes are expressed numerically. Thus, male or female are variable attributes, while 1 (for male) and 2 (for female) are possible (numerical) values used to represent those attributes in a data set.

Did you understand?

+ Test yourself

• 1- The variable age, how many values can have?
  • a- 1 value¹
  • b- 120, from 0 years to 120 years²
  • c- As many as the researcher needs or decides to use³

• 2- The variable gender, how many values can have?
  • a- 2 values⁴
  • b- As many as the researcher needs or decides to use⁵
  • c- Gender does not have values, but attributes⁶

Test answers

1. Incorrect. If a variable only has one value, it is a constant, not a variable.

2. Incorrect. You can use "number of years since born" as values, yes, but you could also use other values, such as the number of months, or the number of days. Furthermore, the amount of values you can have is not fixed to 120 (assuming you thought that 120 years is the maximum number of years a person may live up to). A researcher, for example, may use categories of age rather than number of years as the desired values for the variable "age".

3. Correct. The researcher may decide to have only two values (eg younger then 25 yr / older than 25 yr), or use time since born coded as years, or months, or days, or minutes. Thus, the number of values "age" can have depends on the particular research or researcher.

4. Correct. Most living beings are either male or female.

5. Incorrect. Although technically "correct", in practice a variable needs two values to be considered a variable, and gender has only two possible values; thus, there is little for the researcher to decide upon in this case.

6. Some researchers would say this answer is technically correct. In practice, though, we could use the concept "value" to refer to "attribute", thus simplifying understanding.

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Authors / Editors

JDPerezgonzalez

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