Ordinal Analysis of Behavioral Data

Abstract This chapter discusses statistical methods that make use of ordinal information. There are two main sections, the first covers ordinal measures of correlation and the second covers ordinal measures for group comparisons. The correlation section focuses on descriptive and inferential methods for the bivariate case. There is also a discussion of the comparison of ordinal correlations and a type of ordinal multiple regression. The group comparison section focuses on dominance analysis using the delta measure. Two‐group and multiple‐group situations are discussed as well as factorial designs and designs with correlated data. The methods of the chapter have many desirable properties that argue for their general use. Much data in the social sciences has only ordinal justification and ordinal methods are based on operations consistent with ordinal data. Many research questions in the social sciences are ordinal in nature and ordinal methods provide answers to ordinal questions. The ordinal methods have the advantage of invariance under monotonic transformations so that results obtained on raw data are exactly the same under any order‐preserving transformation. Finally, the ordinal methods have desirable statistical qualities, including few distributional assumptions, resistance to extreme values, and applicability to nonlinear but monotonic relationships.