Types of scales and analysis of distributions in sociology

Abstract

The purpose of the article is to describe some features of the analysis of sociological distributions in accordance with the previously stated understanding of the scales and the specifics of the sociological measurement. The author describes attributive, ordinal and absolute scales with types of sociological distributions. The author presents the opportunities of the comparative analysis of the attributive scales using the data of the presidential elections conducted in Russia and France in 2012. The article provides the analysis of the rank-size distribution. The attributive scales are often convolute ordinal scales; and the notion of the qualitative character is often unreasonable. Using two ordinal scales , an experiment to measure the satisfaction with job is described. The author also considers the trust phenomenon as well as the experiment to measure trust/distrust through new analytical approaches. According to the paper, the hypothesis of normal distribution in sociology is invalid. Distributions by age are shown as a special type of distributions; a hypothesis to explain the shape of the curves of the distributions by age is stated.