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Analysing a single ordinal variable

Introduction

When you have a single ordinal variable (e.g. opinion on something with fully disagree to fully agree) you might be interested in how many respondents selected each of the options (e.g. how many fully disagree, how many disagree, etc.), then visualise these results and last but not least determine if overall they tended more towards one end of the scale or the other (also in the population). The analysis therefor breaks down into the following parts:

Part 1: Descriptive analysis
Use descriptive statistics to get an impression of the data, using:

1a) A frequency table with absolute-, relative-, and cumulative frequencies

1b) A visualisation of the data with a dual axis bar-chart

1c) Some statistical measures for central tendency (the median) and dispersion (measure of consensus)

Part 2: Inferential statistics
After the first impression determine what can be said about the population based on your sample data by:

2a) determine if people tended more towards either end of the scale (a one-sample Wilcoxon sign rank test)

2b) determine the effect sizes (correlation coefficient)

Part 3: Reporting
As the last step, you will need to write up all the results.

Let's begin with getting an impression of the results. Let's begin with getting an impression of the results in the first part.

Single ordinal variable

Introduction

Impression of data

Visualisation of data

Center & Dispersion

Test for median

Effect size

Reporting

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