Within the context of a research investigation, concepts are generally referred

to as variables. A variable is, as the name applies, something that varies. Age,

sex, export, income and expenses, family size, country of birth, capital
expenditure, class grades, blood pressure readings, preoperative anxiety levels,
eye color, and vehicle type are all examples of variables because each of these
properties varies or differs from one individual to another.

Variable Definition in Research

A variable is any property, a characteristic, a number, or a quantity that
increases or decreases over time or can take on different values (as opposed
to constants, such as n, that do not vary) in different situations.

When conducting research, experiments often manipulate variables. For

example, an experimenter might compare the effectiveness of four types of
fertilizers. In this case, the variable is the ‘type of fertilizers’. A social scientist
may examine the possible effect of early marriage on divorce.

Here early marriage is the variable. A business researcher may find it useful to include the
dividend in determining the share prices. Here dividend is the variable.

Effectiveness, divorce and share prices are also variables because they also
vary as a result of manipulating fertilizers, early marriage, and dividends.
 Types of Variable

1. Qualitative Variables.
2. Quantitative Variables.
3. Discrete Variable.
4. Continuous Variable.
5. Dependent Variables.
6. Independent Variables.
7. Background Variable.
8. Moderating Variable.
9. Extraneous Variable.
10. Intervening Variable.
11. Suppressor Variable.

Qualitative Variables
An important distinction between variables is between the qualitative variable
and the quantitative variable.

Qualitative variables are those that express a qualitative attribute such as

hair color, religion, race, gender, social status, method of payment, and so on.
The values of a qualitative variable do not imply a meaningful numerical
ordering.

The value of the variable ‘religion’ (Muslim, Hindu, ..,etc.) differs qualitatively;
no ordering of religion is implied. Qualitative variables are sometimes referred
to as categorical variables.

For example, the variable sex has two distinct categories: ‘male’ and ‘female.’
Since the values of this variable are expressed in categories, we refer to this as
a categorical variable.
Similarly, place of residence may be categorized as being urban and rural and
thus is a categorical variable.

Categorical variables may again be described as nominal and ordinal.

Ordinal variables are those which can be logically ordered or ranked higher or
lower than another but do not necessarily establish a numeric difference
between each category, such as examination grades (A+, A, B+, etc., clothing
size (Extra large, large, medium, small).

Nominal variables are those who can neither be ranked nor logically ordered,
such as religion, sex, etc.

A qualitative variable is a characteristic that is not capable of being measured

but can be categorized to possess or not to possess some characteristics.

Quantitative Variables

Quantitative variables, also called numeric variables, are those variables

that are measured in terms of numbers. A simple example of a quantitative
variable is a person’s age.

The age can take on different values because a person can be 20 years old, 35
years old, and so on. Likewise, family size is a quantitative variable, because a
family might be comprised of one, two, three members, and so on.

That is, each of these properties or characteristics referred to above varies or

differs from one individual to another. Note that these variables are expressed
in numbers, for which we call them quantitative or sometimes numeric
variables.

A quantitative variable is one for which the resulting observations are numeric
and thus possesses a natural ordering or ranking.
 Discrete and Continuous Variables

Quantitative variables are again of two types: discrete and continuous.

Variables such as some children in a household or number of defective items

in a box are discrete variables since the possible scores are discrete on the
scale.

For example, a household could have three or five children, but not 4.52
children.

Other variables, such as ‘time required to complete an MCQ test’ and ‘waiting
time in a queue in front of a bank counter,’ are examples of a continuous
variable.

The time required in the above examples is a continuous variable, which could
be, for example, 1.65 minutes, or it could be 1.6584795214 minutes.

Of course, the practicalities of measurement preclude most measured

variables from being continuous.

Discrete Variable
A discrete variable, restricted to certain values, usually (but not necessarily)
consists of whole numbers, such as the family size, number of defective items
in a box. They are often the results of enumeration or counting.

A few more examples are;

 The number of accidents in the twelve months.

 The number of mobile cards sold in a store within seven days.
 The number of patients admitted to a hospital over a specified period.
 The number of new branches of a bank opened annually during 2001-
2007.
 The number of weekly visits made by health personnel in the last 12
months.

Continuous Variable

A continuous variable is one that may take on an infinite number of

intermediate values along a specified interval. Examples are:

 The sugar level in the human body;

 Blood pressure reading;
 Temperature;
 Height or weight of the human body;
 Rate of bank interest;
 Internal rate of return (IRR),
 Earning ratio (ER);
 Current ratio (CR)

No matter how close two observations might be, if the instrument of

measurement is precise enough, a third observation can be found, which will
fall between the first two.

A continuous variable generally results from measurement and can assume

countless values in the specified range.

Dependent and Independent Variables

In many research settings, there are two specific classes of variables that need
to be distinguished from one another, independent variable and dependent
variable.
 Many research studies are aimed at unrevealing and understanding the causes
of underlying phenomena or problems with the ultimate goal of establishing a
causal relationship between them.

Look at the following statements:

 Low intake of food causes underweight.

 Smoking enhances the risk of lung cancer.
 Level of education influences job satisfaction.
 Advertisement helps in sales promotion.
 The drug causes the improvement of a health problem.
 Nursing intervention causes more rapid recovery.
 Previous job experiences determine the initial salary.
 Blueberries slow down aging.
 The dividend per share determines share prices.

In each of the above queries, we have two variables: one independent and one
dependent. In the first example, ‘low intake of food’ is believed to have caused
the ‘problem of underweight.’ It is thus the so-called independent variable.
Underweight is the dependent variable because we believe that this ‘problem’
(the problem of underweight) has been caused by ‘the low intake of food’ (the
factor).

Similarly, smoking, dividend, and advertisement all are independent variables,

and lung cancer, job satisfaction, and sales are dependent variables.

In general, an independent variable is manipulated by the experimenter or

researcher, and its effects on the dependent variable are measured.

Independent Variable
The variable that is used to describe or measure the factor that is assumed to
cause or at least to influence the problem or outcome is called
an independent variable.
The definition implies that the experimenter uses the independent variable to
describe or explain the influence or effect of it on the dependent variable.

Variability in the dependent variable is presumed to depend on variability in

the independent variable.

Depending on the context, an independent variable is sometimes called a

predictor variable, regressor, controlled variable, manipulated variable,
explanatory variable, exposure variable (as used in reliability theory), risk factor
(as used in medical statistics), feature (as used in machine learning and pattern
recognition) or input variable.

The explanatory variable is preferred by some authors over the independent

variable when the quantities treated as independent variables may not be
statistically independent or independently manipulable by the researcher.

If the independent variable is referred to as an explanatory variable, then the

term response variable is preferred by some authors for the dependent
variable.

Dependent Variable

The variable that is used to describe or measure the problem or outcome

under study is called a dependent variable.

In a causal relationship, the cause is the independent variable, and the effect is
the dependent variable. If we hypothesize that smoking causes lung cancer,
‘smoking’ is the independent variable and cancer the dependent variable.

A business researcher may find it useful to include the dividend in determining

the share prices. Here dividend is the independent variable, while the share
price is the dependent variable. The dependent variable usually is the variable
the researcher is interested in understanding, explaining, or predicting.
In lung cancer research, it is the carcinoma that is of real interest to the
researcher, not smoking behavior per se. The independent variable is the
presumed cause of, antecedent to, or influence on the dependent variable.

Depending on the context, a dependent variable is sometimes called a

response variable, regressand, predicted variable, measured variable,
explained variable, experimental variable, responding variable, outcome
variable, output variable, or label.

An explained variable is preferred by some authors over the dependent

variable when the quantities treated as dependent variables may not be
statistically dependent.

If the dependent variable is referred to as an explained variable, then the term

predictor variable is preferred by some authors for the independent variable.

Levels of an Independent Variable

If an experimenter compares an experimental treatment with a control

treatment, then the independent variable (a type of treatment) has two levels:
experimental and control.

If an experiment were to compare five types of diets, then the independent

variables (types of diet) would have five levels.

In general, the number of levels of an independent variable is the number of

experimental conditions.

Background Variable
In almost every study, we collect information such as age, sex, educational
attainment, socioeconomic status, marital status, religion, place of birth, and
the like. These variables are referred to as background variables.

These variables are often related to many independent variables so that they
influence the problem indirectly. Hence they are called background variables.

If the background variables are important to the study, they should be

measured. However, we should try to keep the number of background
variables as few as possible in the interest of the economy.

Moderating Variable
In any statement of relationships of variables, it is normally hypothesized that
in some way, the independent variable ’causes’ the dependent variable to
occur. In simple relationships, all other variables are extraneous and are
ignored. In actual study situations, such a simple one-to-one relationship
needs to be revised to take other variables into account to better explain the
relationship. This emphasizes the need to consider a second independent
variable that is expected to have a significant contributory or contingent effect
on the originally stated dependent-independent relationship. Such a variable
is termed a moderating variable.

Suppose you are studying the impact of field-based and classroom-based

training on the work performance of the health and family planning workers,
you consider the type of training as the independent variable.

If you are focusing on the relationship between the age of the trainees and
work performance, you might use ‘type of training’ as a moderating variable.

Extraneous Variable
Most studies concern the identification of a single independent variable and
the measurement of its effect on the dependent variable.
But still, several variables might conceivably affect our hypothesized
independent-dependent variable relationship, thereby distorting the study.
These variables are referred to as extraneous variables.

Extraneous variables are not necessarily part of the study. They exert a
confounding effect on the dependent-independent relationship and thus need
to be eliminated or controlled for.

An example may illustrate the concept of extraneous variables. Suppose we

are interested in examining the relationship between the work-status of
mothers and breastfeeding duration.

It is not unreasonable in this instance to presume that the level of education

of mothers as it influences work-status might have an impact on breastfeeding
duration too.

Education is treated here as an extraneous variable. In any attempt to

eliminate or control the effect of this variable, we may consider this variable as
a confounding variable.

An appropriate way of dealing with confounding variables is to follow the

stratification procedure, which involves a separate analysis for the different
levels of lies confounding variables.

For this purpose, one can construct two crosstables: one for illiterate mothers
and the other for literate mothers. If we find a similar association between
work status and duration of breastfeeding in both the groups of mothers, then
we conclude that the educational level of mothers is not a confounding
variable.

Intervening Variable
Often an apparent relationship between two variables is caused by a third
variable. For example, variables X and Y may be highly correlated, but only
because X causes the third variable, Z, which in turn causes Y. In this case, Z is
the intervening variable.

An intervening variable theoretically affects the observed phenomena but

cannot be seen, measured, or manipulated directly; its effects can only be
inferred from the effects of the independent and moderating variables on the
observed phenomena.

In the work-status and breastfeeding relationship, we might view motivation

or counseling as the intervening variable.

Thus, motive, job satisfaction, responsibility, behavior, justice are some of the
examples of intervening variables.

Suppressor Variable
In many cases, we have good reasons to believe that the variables of interest
have a relationship within themselves, but our data fail to establish any such
relationship. Some hidden factors may be suppressing the true relationship
between the two original variables.

Such a factor is referred to as a suppressor variable because it suppresses the

actual relationship between the other two variables.

The suppressor variable suppresses the relationship by being positively

correlated with one of the variables in the relationship and negatively
correlated with the other. The true relationship between the two variables will
reappear when the suppressor variable is controlled for.

Thus, for example, low age may pull education up but income down. In
contrast, a high age may pull income up but education down, effectively
canceling out the relationship between education and income unless age is
controlled for.