Understanding moderation is one of those topics in statistics that is so much harder than it needs to be.
Here are three suggestions to make it just a little easier.
1. Realize that moderation just means an interaction
I have spoken with a number of researchers who are surprised to learn that moderation is just another term for interaction.
Perhaps it’s because moderation often appears with discussions of mediation. Or because we tend to think of interaction as being part of ANOVA, but not regression.
In any case, both an interaction and moderation mean the same thing: the effect of one predictor on a response variable is different at different values of the second predictor. (more…)
Do I really need to learn R?
Someone asked me this recently.
Many R advocates would absolutely say yes to everyone who asks.
I don’t.
(I actually gave her a pretty long answer, summarized here).
It depends on what kind of work you do and the context in which you’re working.
I can say that R is (more…)
In this follow-up to December’s webinar, we’ll finish up our discussion of interactions.
There is something about interactions that is incredibly confusing.
An interaction between two predictor variables means that one predictor variable affects a third variable differently at different values of the other predictor.
How you understand that interaction depends on many things, including:
- Whether one, or both, of the predictor variables is categorical or numerical
- How each of those variables is coded (specifically, whether each categorical variable is dummy or effect coded and whether numerical variables are centered)
- Whether it’s a two-way or three-way interaction
- Whether there is a directionality to the interaction (moderation) or not
Sometimes you need to get pretty sophisticated in your coding, in the output you ask for, and in writing out regression equations.
In this webinar, we’ll examine how to put together and break apart output to understand what your interaction is telling you.
Note: This training is an exclusive benefit to members of the Statistically Speaking Membership Program and part of the Stat’s Amore Trainings Series. Each Stat’s Amore Training is approximately 90 minutes long.
About the Instructor

Karen Grace-Martin helps statistics practitioners gain an intuitive understanding of how statistics is applied to real data in research studies.
She has guided and trained researchers through their statistical analysis for over 15 years as a statistical consultant at Cornell University and through The Analysis Factor. She has master’s degrees in both applied statistics and social psychology and is an expert in SPSS and SAS.
Not a Member Yet?
It’s never too early to set yourself up for successful analysis with support and training from expert statisticians.
Just head over and sign up for Statistically Speaking.
You'll get access to this training webinar, 130+ other stats trainings, a pathway to work through the trainings that you need — plus the expert guidance you need to build statistical skill with live Q&A sessions and an ask-a-mentor forum.
There is something about interactions that is incredibly confusing.
An interaction between two predictor variables means that one predictor variable affects a third variable differently at different values of the other predictor.
How you understand that interaction depends on many things, including:
- Whether one, or both, of the predictor variables is categorical or numerical
- How each of those variables is coded (specifically, whether each categorical variable is dummy or effect coded and whether numerical variables are centered)
- Whether it’s a two-way or three-way interaction
- Whether there is a directionality to the interaction (moderation) or not
Sometimes you need to get pretty sophisticated in your coding, in the output you ask for, and in writing out regression equations.
In this webinar, we’ll examine how to put together and break apart output to understand what your interaction is telling you.
Note: This training is an exclusive benefit to members of the Statistically Speaking Membership Program and part of the Stat’s Amore Trainings Series. Each Stat’s Amore Training is approximately 90 minutes long.
About the Instructor

Karen Grace-Martin helps statistics practitioners gain an intuitive understanding of how statistics is applied to real data in research studies.
She has guided and trained researchers through their statistical analysis for over 15 years as a statistical consultant at Cornell University and through The Analysis Factor. She has master’s degrees in both applied statistics and social psychology and is an expert in SPSS and SAS.
Not a Member Yet?
It’s never too early to set yourself up for successful analysis with support and training from expert statisticians.
Just head over and sign up for Statistically Speaking.
You'll get access to this training webinar, 130+ other stats trainings, a pathway to work through the trainings that you need — plus the expert guidance you need to build statistical skill with live Q&A sessions and an ask-a-mentor forum.
There are dozens of measures of association. Even just correlations come in many flavors: Pearson, Spearman, biserial, tetrachoric, squared multiple, to name a few.
And there are many measures beyond correlation.
You probably learned many of these way back in intro stat, then promptly forgot about them. That may be reasonable, but they do pop up as important within the context of other, more complicated statistical methods. A strong foundation in the measures of association makes those other methods much easier to understand.
In this webinar, we’re going to re-examine many of these measures, see how they fit together (or don’t), and talk about when each one is useful.
Note: This training is an exclusive benefit to members of the Statistically Speaking Membership Program and part of the Stat’s Amore Trainings Series. Each Stat’s Amore Training is approximately 90 minutes long.
About the Instructor

Karen Grace-Martin helps statistics practitioners gain an intuitive understanding of how statistics is applied to real data in research studies.
She has guided and trained researchers through their statistical analysis for over 15 years as a statistical consultant at Cornell University and through The Analysis Factor. She has master’s degrees in both applied statistics and social psychology and is an expert in SPSS and SAS.
Not a Member Yet?
It’s never too early to set yourself up for successful analysis with support and training from expert statisticians.
Just head over and sign up for Statistically Speaking.
You'll get access to this training webinar, 130+ other stats trainings, a pathway to work through the trainings that you need — plus the expert guidance you need to build statistical skill with live Q&A sessions and an ask-a-mentor forum.
Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is a handy statistical tool to always have available in your data analysis tool belt.
It’s a data reduction technique, which means it’s a way of capturing the variance in many variables in a smaller, easier-to-work-with set of variables.
There are many, many details involved, though, so here are a few things to remember as you run your PCA.
1. The goal of PCA is to summarize the correlations among a set of observed variables with a smaller set of linear (more…)