> On 21 Apr 2000 17:25:01 GMT, [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Wen-Feng
> Hsiao) wrote:
>
> > Dear Ulrich,
> >
> > Thanks for your reply. I have obtained a book of Agresti from library --
> > Statistical Methods for the Social Sciences, 2nd edition. I fortunately
> > locate Section 7.4 titled 'comments concering nonparametric statistics'
> > (p. 186), which explictly addresses the problem of treating ordinal
> > variables as interval variables. It mentioned that the scoring system
> > assigning scores 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 to the five categories, say, very
> > liberal, slightly liberal, moderate slightly conservative, very
> > conservative, is quite dangerous...
What my local library had was the 1997, 3rd Edition of that textbook
by Agresti and Finlay.
Section 7.5 is on Nonparametric Statistics. I am happy to report that
Agresti and Finlay apparently changed their minds since the 2nd
Edition; that comment is not there. They do warn that "choice of
scores may lead to different conclusions," and that is fair; and they
point to Problem 7.48 as an example.
(Prob. 7.48: Hospital B is both better and worse than A, since it
owns both extremes. By the way, the numbers in 7.48 are also
imappropriate for K-S testing, or for rank-testing, or for anything
except categorical testing, unless you are will to make the strong
assumption that you *can* apply useful, numeric scores or weights to
the three categories.)
It looks as if there may be other comments in the book about rankings,
so I will be looking at it more closely, over the weekend.
--
RichUlrich, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.pitt.edu/~wpilib/index.html
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