Using ridits to assign scores to categories of ordinal scales
When dealing with ordinal data, many methods require you to assign a number or score to each level of a variable. For instance, if you ask people about their political orientation and whether it is very conservative, somewhat conservative, moderate, somewhat liberal or very liberal, you might assign these scores of 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5, respectively. But that is somewhat arbitrary.
One alternative was suggested by Bross (1958) and brought to my attention in reading Alan Agresti’s excellent book: Analysis of Ordinal Categorical Data . Continue reading 'Using ridits to assign scores to categories of ordinal scales'»