The nominal level provided us with much in the way of capabilities for further exploration. Moving one level up, we are now on the ordinal scale. The ordinal scale inherits all of the properties of the nominal level, but has important additional properties:
- Data at the ordinal level can be naturally ordered
- This implies that some data values in the column can be considered better than or greater than others
As with the nominal level, data at the ordinal level is still categorical in nature, even if numbers are used to represent the categories.