Types of Variables – Statistics Basics

00:01 There are two broad flavors or categories of variables, continuous and categorical, we sometimes called categorical discrete as well. So continuous variables are things like age, height and distance and temperature, what makes them continuous is that there is value in between their values. For example, being 25 years old means something, being 25,5 years old mean something, being 25,52 years old means something and so forth. On the other hand, gender doesn't have a lot of in betweens. I can be male, I can be female.

00:39 I cannot be something in between the two of them, unless we're into transgender issues, but that's a political delineation, not an epidemiological one. Perhaps a more convincing example would be the number of siblings you might have, 1, 2, 3, I can't have 2,5 siblings, I can't have 3,4 children, I can't have 2,8 doors in my house, these are countable numbers, they are discrete, they are categorical. Now when we have a categorical variable with two