Abstract

The article deals with the problem of the dispersion of ordinal variables. At first, it specifies the very concept of dispersion for this type of scale. Then some of the most known measures that fit to the concept of ordinal variation are recalled. They are constructed with two different types of statistical models: using loss functions and using distance functions. Finally, a new approach, which is the use of an axiomatic method for the construction of a dispersion measure, is proposed. Some relations and comparisons between different measures and between different approaches are shown.