It is possible to distinguish between two types of values:

• Discrete
• Continuous

Discrete values can only assume “whole” values, such as “Man”, “Women”, “Green”, “Car”, and “House”.

Continuous values can assume any value along a scale, such as “3.5 years”, “58.3 seconds”, and “163.5 centimetres”.

Note Continuous variables (i.e. on a ratio or interval scale) do not necessarily have continuous values. For example, number of cars is a ratio variable but it has discrete values: while the average number of cars in a population may be 0.8, it is not correct (although many do) to say that any given individual in a population has 0.8 cars (since a car is a “whole” value).