Is it really ok to treat Likert items as continuous? And can you just decide to combine Likert items to make a scale? Likert-type data is extremely common—and so are questions like these about how to analyze it appropriately. (more…)
Is it really ok to treat Likert items as continuous? And can you just decide to combine Likert items to make a scale? Likert-type data is extremely common—and so are questions like these about how to analyze it appropriately. (more…)
When is it important to use adjusted R-squared instead of R-squared?
R², the the Coefficient of Determination, is one of the most useful and intuitive statistics we have in linear regression.
It tells you how well the model predicts the outcome and has some nice properties. But it also has one big drawback.
What are the assumptions of linear models? If you compare two lists of assumptions, most of the time they’re not the same.
(more…)
When your dependent variable is not continuous, unbounded, and measured on an interval or ratio scale, linear models don’t fit. The data just will not meet the assumptions of linear models. But there’s good news, other models exist for many types of dependent variables.
Today I’m going to go into more detail about 6 common types of dependent variables that are either discrete, bounded, or measured on a nominal or ordinal scale and the tests that work for them instead. Some are all of these.
When we think about model assumptions, we tend to focus on assumptions like independence, normality, and constant variance. The other big assumption, which is harder to see or test, is that there is no specification error. The assumption of linearity is part of this, but it’s actually a bigger assumption.
What is this assumption of no specification error? (more…)