Treating an ordinal variable as though it is measured at the interval level is not as serious a problem as treating a nominal variable with more than two categories as a variable measured at the interval level because a nominal variable has no order.

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Ordinal variables maintain a rank order, which can sometimes justify their treatment as interval variables under certain conditions, whereas nominal variables lack any order, making their treatment as interval variables more problematic due to the absence of meaningful distances between categories.

Treating an Ordinal Variable as Though It Is Measured at the Interval