59 We might even be willing to tolerate the use of numeric variables to represent ordinal scale variables, such as those that you typically get when you ask people to rank order items (e.g., like we d...59 We might even be willing to tolerate the use of numeric variables to represent ordinal scale variables, such as those that you typically get when you ask people to rank order items (e.g., like we do in Australian elections), though as we will see R actually has a built in tool for representing ordinal data (see Section 7.11.2) However, when it comes to nominal scale data, it becomes completely unacceptable, because almost all of the “usual” rules for what you’re allowed to do with numbers do…
