ABSTRACT
This chapter presents techniques for dealing with the analysis of the relationship between three or more variables. Given the nature of the social and political world, we frequently face situations where there are several, or even many, possible causes of some phenomenon. Just think how many different factors might go into an individual’s voting decision, ranging from the party identification adopted in childhood, to a variety of attitudes and opinions, to news broadcasts and campaign appeals immediately before the election. Sorting out potential independent variables is largely a matter of controlling-and, as you know from Chapter 3, the use of control variables is essential in the correlational research design. In this chapter you will learn techniques for imposing those controls. We will begin with the method for nominal and ordinal category variables and then turn to interval techniques.
