Values assigned to items in a sample to determine their relative occurrence in a population.

positions in an increasing or decreasing ordering, labelled as 1, 2, ... n. The minimum (and maximum) are assigned rank either 1 or n. Ranks may be averaged where values are tied.

The position of a particular case (e.g., person) relative to other cases on a defined scale--as in "1st place," "2nd place," etc. Note that when the actual values of the numbers designating the relative positions (the ranks) are used in the analysis they are being treated as an interval scale, not an ordinal scale. See also INTERVAL SCALE, ORDINAL SCALE.

Values found by first ordering the observations in a sample from smallest to largest. The smallest value is assigned a rank of 1, the second smallest gets a rank of 2, and so on. If several values are equal in magnitude, their ranks are pooled and each is assigned the average rank. Ranks are used in many nonparametric tests where it is not reasonable to assume that the sample comes from a normal distribution.