--- Nick Cox <[email protected]> wrote:
> Roughly speaking, my experience is that natural scientists
> (physicists, biologists, etc.) are more likely to take normalised as
> meaning scaled to [0, 1], far more commonly by
> (value - min) / (max - min) than by percentile ranks. The more
> statistics you know, the more likely you are to regard
> (value - mean) / sd as a natural standardisation.
The funny thing is that (value - mean) / sd scores are often
interpreted in terms of percentile ranks: a value of -2 can usually be
considered small because, if the variable is reasonable close to a
Gaussian distribution, one would expect that approximately 2.5% of the
respondent would have a smaller value (and thus 97.5% of the
respondents to have a larger value). That looks suspiciously like a
percentile rank to me... This is one of the reasons why I think that
there is quite some merit in using percentile ranks as a form of
standardization.
-- Maarten
-----------------------------------------
Maarten L. Buis
Department of Social Research Methodology
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Boelelaan 1081
1081 HV Amsterdam
The Netherlands
visiting address:
Buitenveldertselaan 3 (Metropolitan), room N515
+31 20 5986715
http://home.fsw.vu.nl/m.buis/
-----------------------------------------
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