Stephen Black wrote:
> I also side with Jim Clark on this one. This is a debate that
> split experimental psychology some years ago (Can you say "John
> Gaito"?). The opinion I arrived at was that levels of measurement
> is one of those topics that we like to torture students with but
> has no real utility (another example is the negative/positive
> reinforcement distinction). Even though the t-test is supposed
> only to be used with data which satisfies a rather restrictive
> set of assumptions, it turns out to be "robust" when its
> assumptions are violated, so it can be happily (and justifiably)
> used in lots of other cases.
Is it fair to say that the current consensus is that t-tests and
means are useful for what we have always thought of as ordinally scaled data
(for example, code numbers assigned to points along a "strongly agree" to
"strongly disagree" variable)? I personally still feel moral anxiety when I
do that kind of thing <grin>, and I'd love to relieve my feelings of guilt.
Paul Smith
Alverno College
Milwaukee
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