Measurement problems pervade most data obtained on questionnaires. One important class of problems seems to reside in the nature of measurement, and may be identified through a study of a definition of measurement. For the purposes of this paper a useful definition has been stated by Caws [3, p.5]. In an article on measurement in physics, he wrote: "Measurement is the assignment of particular mathematical characteristics to conceptual entities in such a way as to permit (1) an unambiguous mathematical description of every situation involving the entity and (2) the arrangement of all occurrences of it in a quasi-serial order."
Under this definition the measurement process requires (a) a conceptualization of certain properties of a class of objects, (b) the existence of an ordered class of elements, and (c) a mechanism for establishing a one-to-one correspondence between the set of conceptual entities and the ordered class of elements.
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