There is something that will get you into trouble if you don’t know about it, and which in my experience very few Black Belts or even Master Black Belts know about. It’s only in the mind of the person doing the research, and no software program will know about it. This mysterious property is “measurement level,” and that is what I want to talk about this month.

What are measurement levels?

For the technoid-minded, there’s a great article* by Warren Sarle that explains this in more detail, and because measurement levels affect anyone who uses data to make decisions I thought a less technical version might be useful.

Let’s go back to basics for a minute. What are data?

Well, that’s a profound question if you think about it. Something happens, and we want to describe it. Perhaps our eyeballs and brains translate electromagnetic waves into an idea of “red.” Perhaps a micrometer translates a thickness into centimeters. Something needs to take what happened and convert it into something we can describe. This process is measurement. A numerical output from measurement is a datum.

 …