A cell phone service provider has 14,000 customers. Recently, the sales department selected a random sample of 400 customer accounts and recorded the number of minutes of long distance time used during the previous billing period. The company analyst used Excel to sort these values in order from high to low. She then assigned the highest value a rank of 1, the next highest value a rank of 2, and so forth. These ranks would be considered to be ordinal data.

Question

Quizplus · Accepted Answer

Ordinal data is characterized by the order of values, but not the exact difference between them. Ranking the long distance time from highest to lowest creates an ordered dataset without specifying the precise difference in usage between ranks, fitting the definition of ordinal data.

A Cell Phone Service Provider Has 14,000 Customers