Sorry per advance if my question is not in the right place but I couldn't find a statistics-dedicated Stack Overflow site. Anyway, here is my problem:
One friend of mine is currently writing her phD thesis on law field. She showed me one of her chart that tickled my mathematical sense. It is a bar chart based on qualitative values. These evaluated classes can be ordered even if they are not numericals:
e.g. "Shows no interest" -> "Shows a little of interest" -> "Secretely seems to enjoy it" -> "Express its interest"
As you can see, there is a gradation between these classes even if they don't rely on numericals... In the case of her chart, the shape of the bars looks like the one of a Gaussian, but my problem is: is it right to describes it as so ? For me, there is a difference between a Gaussian and a Maxwellian for example and relying on qualitative values I could just shift the last class to the right (who cares, these are non-numerical values) to pass from one to the other.
Any suggestion on this kind of problem?