Overview

Measurement has been essential to the development of our civilization. Measures allowed registering the passage of time and establishing the yearly cycle of seasons, and facilitated trading in goods. Over the centuries, measurement aided the advance of the sciences and the development of technologies. Measurement is essential to the function of today's sophisticated society, and remains the basis of all business and trade. It is fundamental to the development of fields of endeavour as diverse as astronomy and architecture, medicine and chemistry, software engineering and economics, management and finance, psychology and politics.

Measurement is central to problem solving, and is the cornerstone of our systems methodology. Effective problem solving is only possible if the principles and concepts of measurement are well understood, the measurement process itself is correctly carried out, and the validity of the results is unchallengeable.

In this chapter we look briefly at classical measurement theory, and examine what are and what are not permissible measures. We examine symbol systems and scale types as the bases for recording the result of measurement, and present different methods for obtaining measures. We introduce the idea of a hierarchy of measures, the measurement of an individual characteristic being at the lowest level, and the highest level providing a basis for explicitly formulating and unambiguously expressing value judgments by use of measures.