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Re: st: Nominal or ordinal?
From
Richard Williams <[email protected]>
To
[email protected], [email protected]
Subject
Re: st: Nominal or ordinal?
Date
Thu, 12 Aug 2010 17:55:49 -0500
I am not so trusting, partly because I don't think ordinal regression
is all that much harder than ols regression. And, if you do things
like a plot of residuals versus fitted, it is pretty clear that a 4
category ordinal dependent variable is not behaving the way you would
like it to for OLS regression, e.g. OLS assumptions about error terms
being homoskedastic and normally distributed are clearly violated. Example:
use "http://www.indiana.edu/~jslsoc/stata/spex_data/ordwarm2.dta";, clear
tab1 warm
reg warm yr89 male white age ed prst
rvfplot
That plot certainly doesn't look like a random scatter of points.
Having said that, if the ordinal variable is independent rather than
dependent, it is pretty easy to test whether it is ok to treat it as
continuous. Long and Freese (in the 2006 book available from Stata
Press that I referenced earlier) show how in Ch. 9 of their book.
Basically, you run a model where the variable is treated as
continuous and another model where you break the variable up into
dummies. If breaking up into dummies does not significantly improve
fit you can treat the variable as continuous.
At 04:26 PM 8/12/2010, Michael N. Mitchell wrote:
Dear Dave (and all others)
I know I am personally rather trusting of treating such scales as
interval data... do you or any others have suggestions on
references justifying the treatment of scales like this as interval?
Many thanks,
Michael N. Mitchell
Data Management Using Stata - http://www.stata.com/bookstore/dmus.html
A Visual Guide to Stata Graphics - http://www.stata.com/bookstore/vgsg.html
Stata tidbit of the week - http://www.MichaelNormanMitchell.com
On 2010-08-12 1.29 PM, David Bell wrote:
--
Chelsea,
Most of the world is willing to treat scales like this as interval
data. Sure it isn't "exactly" interval. Be sure to consider
whether your audience will be familiar with interpretations of
ordinal logit regressions.
Dave
====================================
David C. Bell
Professor of Sociology
Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)
(317) 278-1336
====================================
On Aug 12, 2010, at 2:59 PM, Polis, Chelsea B. wrote:
Dear Statalisters,
I am working with a dependent variable that has the following four
potential responses: (1) Not Likely, (2) Slightly Likely,
(3) Quite Likely, (4) Extremely Likely.
A colleague thinks this is an ordinal variable which should be
analyzed using ordered logit regression. My sense was that
this is a nominal variable, and should be analyzed using
multinomial regression - since we cannot know if the levels are
equally spaced in people's minds.
My apologies for what is probably a very simplistic question, but
I've searched Statalist and online, and I still am not
entirely certain. I would greatly appreciate input on this question.
Thanks,
Chelsea
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-------------------------------------------
Richard Williams, Notre Dame Dept of Sociology
OFFICE: (574)631-6668, (574)631-6463
HOME: (574)289-5227
EMAIL: [email protected]
WWW: http://www.nd.edu/~rwilliam
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