6.6: Typologies

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Scales and indexes generate ordinal measures of unidimensional constructs. However, researchers sometimes wish to summarize measures of two or more constructs to create a set of categories or types called a typology. Unlike scales or indexes, typologies are multidimensional but include only nominal variables. For instance, one can create a political typology of newspapers based on their orientation toward domestic and foreign policy, as expressed in their editorial columns, as shown in Figure 6.2. This typology can be used to categorize newspapers into one of four “ideal types” (A through D), identify the distribution of newspapers across these ideal types, and perhaps even create a classificatory model to classifying newspapers into one of these four ideal types depending on other attributes.

Figure 6.2. A multi-dimensional typology of newspapers