Abstract A published method for analyzing multiple 2×2 contingency tables arising in retrospective studies of disease is extended in application and form. Extensions of application include comparisons of age-adjusted death rates, life-table analyses, comparisons of two sets of quantal dosage-response data, and miscellaneous laboratory applications as appropriate. Extensions in form involve considering multiple contingency tables with arbitrarily many rows and/or columns, where rows and columns are orderable, and may even be on a continuous scale. The assignment of some score for each row or column is essential to use of the method. With scores assigned, a deviation of the sum of cross products from expectation, and its variance conditioned on all marginal totals, are computed for each table and a chi square is determined corresponding to the grand total of the deviations. For various specific instances and for various scoring procedures, the procedure extends or is equivalent to the asymptotic form of many known non-parametric techniques.
Nathan Mantel (1963) studied this question.