[avs733]

Simple...data representation is not the same as data meaning.

I teach an introductory stats course and we hammer this in. Categorical data are often represented as numbers or other short indicators for storage purposes. Typically I fmultiple choice the encoding is by the order of the choice options.

I not infrequently see average of gender because male = 0 and female = 1 or vice versa and someone generates a table without thinking.

[shriphani]

The bigger issue here seems to be the use of ordinals in the data collection process. For instance, a lot of my CSVs don't have them and R and pandas are perfectly capable of enumerating. Why do you even need to put ordinals in the dataset? Does excel want this sort of thing or something?

[avs733]

Your don't need to people just do... I've kinda always assumed or connects to olden days and efficient storage and memory use. Male is a four character string, 1 is an integer.

[LorenPechtel]

Aha! Now we see why there are so many transgendered people these days! :):):)