What is one of the key distinctions of ordinal level measures?

One of the key distinctions of ordinal level measures is that they specify the order of cases in terms of greater than and less than. This means that ordinal measures rank the data points based on their relative position, allowing for the determination of which items are higher or lower in a given hierarchy. For instance, in a survey where respondents rank their satisfaction on a scale from "very dissatisfied" to "very satisfied," the rankings indicate a distinct order of preference, even though the exact differences between those ranks are not quantified.

Ordinal measurements provide valuable information about the sequence or ranking of data, but they do not imply equal intervals between ranks. This characteristic is vital in many social science research contexts, where understanding the order of responses is more important than the precise differences in the values themselves.