Business Statistics Made Easy in SAS

Overview of Associations for Different Variable Types

Recall from Chapter 3 that there are three broad categories of variables, namely:

• Categorical variables: Data such as the industry of a firm or religion of a person, that indicates only membership of an observation in a certain category, with no other mathematical meaning to the data (no preference or order of the categories, no possibility of mathematical operations on the data).
• Ordinal data: Data such as rankings of consumer car preferences. The data has only an order, but no sense of the distances between the data points.
• Continuous data: Data on a scale running from low to high on a relatively mathematically fine scale, such as prices or perhaps answers to a survey ...