Effect sizes are important because they are an accessible way to indicate the practical importance of observed associations or differences. Standardized mean difference (SMD) effect sizes, such as Cohen's d, are widely used in education and the social sciences -- in part because they are relatively easy to calculate. However, SMD effect sizes…

Many of us in the social sciences deal with data that do not conform to assumptions of normality and/or homoscedasticity/homogeneity of variance. Some research has shown that parametric tests (e.g., multiple regression, ANOVA) can be robust to modest violations of these assumptions. Yet the reality is that almost all analyses (even nonparametric…

A new computer subroutine has been developed for calculating the tetrachoric correlation coefficient. Recent advances in computing inverse normal and bivariate normal distributions have been utilized. The procedure is useful for item analysis. (Author/JKS)

The program presented computes a chi-square statistic for testing pattern hypotheses on correlation matrices. The statistic is based on a multivariate generalization of the Fisher r-to-z transformation. This statistic has small sample performance which is superior to an analogous likelihood ratio statistic obtained via the analysis of covariance…