ABSTRACT
There are a myriad of statistical procedures that can be used to address research questions in the social sciences. However, the required courses in most social science programs pay little to no attention to procedures that can be used with categorical data. There are good reasons for this, both pedagogical and conceptual. Statistical procedures for categorical data require a new set of “tools,” or a new way of thinking because of the different distributional assumptions that must be made for these types of variables. Therefore, these procedures differ conceptually from those that we assume readers of this book are familiar with, such as multiple regression and analysis of variance (ANOVA). However, acquiring a conceptual understanding of the procedures that can be used to analyze categorical data opens a whole new world of possibilities to social science researchers. In this chapter we introduce the reader to these possibilities, explain categorical variables, and give a brief overview of the history of the methods for their analysis.
