Sheep Stations: The Ratio Data Rant

This is what I told my Singapore students was like playing for sheep stations. Getting your data right. The different types of data can allow you to breathe life into your observations or stay mediocre.


I was amazed when, once, an experienced commercial data person refused to acknowledge that there might be some value in restructuring a nominal variable (Internet use frequency eg daily, few times a week, weekly) into an order of less frequent to most frequent. Essentially all they wanted to do was build pie charts, but were deliberately depriving themselves of a chance to be really clever.

God forbid they would have actually asked "how many times a week do you typically use the Internet" and get even better quality data.

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