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True or false: In a survey of your neighbors (asking for family size, the kind of pets they have, the grade of the youngest child in the family, the family's annual income in dollars, what the dad does for a living, whether mom works, and their phone number), the only discrete, numerical data you're collecting about your neighbors is family size.

So this is something I'm having trouble with. I understand that discrete data are data that you are counting, and that numerical data are numbers which represent something. But what I don't get is whether the family's income counts as discrete.

Overall, I think the answer is true, can someone help?

CyanogenCX
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  • Please add the [self-study] tag & read its wiki. – gung - Reinstate Monica Sep 17 '15 at 03:33
  • Family size is a count variable which is discrete numeric. But we don't know for sure in advance how it effects orher things. The effects could be very nonlinear which might call better to treat family size as ordinal or even nominal variable. For example, family of size 2 could influence some phenomenon positively like family size 5+, while of size 3-4 could exert negative influence. – ttnphns Nov 14 '18 at 06:23

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Your problem seems to come from your definitions, which are not orthodox. For example, a question in a survey that asks family size may collect counts, which are by definition discrete but are also clearly numeric, and it represents something (i.e., the size of the family).

I suspect that you will find this area a lot easier of you: 1. Abandon the distinction between numeric and discrete data, and replace it with the more orthodox taxonomy of: nominal, ordinal, interval and ratio. 2. Keep in mind that there is a difference between the properties of the objects being measured versus the properties of the collected data. For example, family size is potentially a (discrete) ratio scale, but most questionnaires obtain only ordinal data (due to the capping).

Tim
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I think discrete numerical data is number data that can be counted (number of kids, cars, dollars??). COntinuous numerical data is number data that can be measured e.g. time, length, weight, and can have any numerical value. Categorical data is like kind of pets they have. I'm unsure whether dollars is counted or measured - dollars are counted, but you can give dollar amounts in decimal places (like the stock exchange) :)

Emma
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