A Problem with Discretizing Vale–Maurelli in Simulation Studies

Previous influential simulation studies investigate the effect of underlying non-normality in ordinal data using the Vale-Maurelli (VM) simulation method. We show that discretized data stemming from the VM method with a prescribed target covariance matrix are usually numerically equal to data stemming from discretizing a multivariate normal vector. This normal vector has, however, a different covariance matrix than the target. It follows that these simulation studies have in fact studied data stemming from normal data with a possibly misspecified covariance structure. This observation affects the interpretation of previous simulation studies.