Statistics of ordinal variation

Whereas measures of variation in nominal data have long been recognized and used by sociologists, measures of variation for ordered categorical data h ave received little attention. The authors discuss the potential usefulness of ordinal dispersion statistics in sociology and define a broad class of such measures, some of which have previously been proposed in other forms. This article focuses on two statistics, termed l(2) and l, which are [0 - 1 ] normed measures of concentration or dispersion, and illustrates their use for two purposes: measuring inequality and cultural consensus. The bias, v ariance, and use of these statistics in inference are discussed. The articl e concludes with a substantive application of these statistics and a compar ison to the performance of conventional variation statistics.