Heuristics of Applying Statistical Tests Using Appropriate Measurement Scales

This paper aims to present the abridged guidelines for the usage of various measurement scales in social research. Selection of measurement scales play a pivotal role in social science research and most of statistical techniques and tests require a specific measurement scales to be employed in the research. This paper starts with a summary of measurement scales and then provides useful guidelines for permissible arithmetic operations, permissible descriptive statistics, and permissible graphical presentations. It also provides summary of statistical tests for independent and dependent variables containing different measurement scales and permissible uni-variate, bivariate and multivariate statistical analysis for different measurement scales. At the end it provides limitations of this study