You are a health care administrator, interested in collecting demographic inform

Question

You are a health care administrator, interested in collecting demographic information about your patient population in order to find out whether you are adequately serving low-income people in your community hospital, comparing your own patient data to larger population-based surveys. You find that when you ask patients directly about their income, they usually refuse to answer, but when you ask whether their income is from 0-$20,000, $21,000 - $50,000, or above $50,000, they are more willing to give that information. Of the four types of variables, what kind of variable results from this type of question? Is the data discrete or continuous? Clearly explain your answer in at least 2-3 sentences.

Explanation / Answer

Categorical variables are also known as discrete or qualitative variables. Categorical variables can be further categorized as either nominal, ordinal or dichotomous.

Ordinal variables are variables that have two or more categories just like nominal variables only the categories can also be ordered or ranked.

Here, income is having categories from 0-$20,000, $21,000 - $50,000, or above $50,000

Thusm this is ordinal categorical and discrete

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