Ordinal Methods for Behavioral Data Analysis

This book was written with the belief that ordinal statistical methods--sometimes discussed under the title of "nonparametric statistics"--deserve much more serious attention as research tools than they have traditionally had. There are three classes of reasons for this: *Many behavioral variables constitute only ordinal scales, not interval measurements that are required for traditional statistics. *Various research issues that are of primary interest in behavioral research are themselves questions about order: Which group scores higher? Is the order on this variable similar to the order on that? *Inferences from ordinal statistics are less subject to distributional peculiarities of the data than are those…