Hi all, Thanks to everyone who responded to my query. For anyone who may be interested, I will try to summarize the responses I have gotten to my original message (shown below). I make no assertions as to the appropriateness of any of these suggestions. Here is some additional background on the study: males and a small number of females were asked to rate on a 5 point scale (1 = never, 5 = always) their response to a partner using violence against them. There are three behavioral responses: stop their aggression, increase their aggression, laugh at partner's effort, and 5 feelings: angry, afraid, amused, insulted and threatened. The most highly correlated are laugh and amused. The sample size is 61. The reason I'm concerned about correlation is that Aldenderfer and Blashfield (1984) state that using highly correlated variables is implicit weighting. However, they don't define "high" correlation. Suggestions: 1) use Mahalanobis distance 2) do principal components analysis first 3) drop one of the correlated pair 4) replace the most highly correlated pair with their average 5) it's not a problem I think that I may end up doing 3 and/or 4 and comparing the results to including all the variables. I'm reluctant to use principal components since I'm not familiar with the technique and it would seem to complicate final interpretation. My reading of Aldenderfer and Blashfield (1984) would suggest that using Mahalanobis distance would be a good way to handle this situation, but unfortunately I don't have that option in the statistical software that I am using. Clare >I am beginning to perform a cluster analysis with 7 variables reflecting a subject's behaviors and >feelings in reaction to a partner's use of violence against them. However, some of these variables are >correlated (correlations range from 0.010 to 0.696) and I'm not sure how to handle this situation. What >level of correlation is a problem? Should one of the pair of correlated variables be removed from >consideration and, if so, how does one choose? ******************************************* Clare Guse, MS Biostatistician Dept. of Family & Community Medicine Division of Research Center for Practice-Based Research (CPBR) Medical College of Wisconsin [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] 414-456-8699 414-456-6522 (FAX) *******************************************
