Michael, There are couple of standard ways to transform skewed data. Invert the data (subtract each datum from one greater than the highest value) so that the skew is positive. Then, Depending of the strength of the skew, do a square root or logarithmic transformation. Alternatively, don't invert it and take the reciprocal (1/x) of each datum).
Chris ....... Christopher D Green Department of Psychology York University Toronto, ON M6C 1G4 [email protected] http://www.yorku.ca/christo > On Nov 11, 2013, at 1:01 PM, Michael Britt <[email protected]> wrote: > > I did a survey which asked respondents how satisfied they are in their > current (romantic) relationship on a 1=10 point scale (where 10="very > satisfied). While there was some variation, not surprisingly, the results > are strongly negatively skewed. That makes sense - most people are probably > satisfied with their relationships or they would leave the other person (or > there's some form of cognitive dissonance going on, but that's not my > question. > > No matter how big the sample size (mine was 160 respondents) I assume you'll > always get a skewed distribution on a question like this so wouldn't I be > breaking the normalization assumption if I were to do correlations using > these results? I assume I could either do: a) do some kind of > transformation - but I've never done one before so I’m not familiar with it, > or b) recode the data into 3 categories (perhaps 1-5 is low satisfaction, 6-7 > is moderate and 8-10 is high) and do a chi-squre instead of a correlation. > > Any thoughts? Appreciate it. > > Michael > > Michael A. Britt, Ph.D. > [email protected] > http://www.ThePsychFiles.com > Twitter: @mbritt > > > --- > You are currently subscribed to tips as: [email protected]. > To unsubscribe click here: > http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=430248.781165b5ef80a3cd2b14721caf62bd92&n=T&l=tips&o=30023 > or send a blank email to > leave-30023-430248.781165b5ef80a3cd2b14721caf62b...@fsulist.frostburg.edu > --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [email protected]. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5&n=T&l=tips&o=30040 or send a blank email to leave-30040-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
