Young Michael E
492 Bluemont Hall, Department of Psychological Sciences, Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS 66506-5302, USA.
Behav Processes. 2016 Feb;123:43-53. doi: 10.1016/j.beproc.2015.09.009. Epub 2015 Sep 28.
Continua abound in the natural world, but the treatment of these continua in the psychological study of behavior is often categorical. Four practices and their consequences are considered: limited sampling of a continuum, turning continuous predictors into categories through dichotomization and similar practices, treating continuous predictors as categorical in an analysis, and overuse of the analysis of variance. Concrete examples illustrate the consequences of these practices. Recommendations to improve the treatment of continua, both in the design and analysis of data, are provided.
自然界中连续体比比皆是，但在行为心理学研究中对这些连续体的处理往往是分类式的。本文考虑了四种做法及其后果：对连续体进行有限抽样、通过二分法及类似做法将连续预测变量转化为类别、在分析中将连续预测变量当作类别来处理，以及过度使用方差分析。具体实例说明了这些做法的后果。本文还给出了在数据设计和分析中改进对连续体处理的建议。
