Integrated Approach to Measuring Association

In spite of the variety of measures of association available for data analysis, there is considerable difficulty in finding any coilsistent logic which can provide an integrated approach to association at all levels of measurement. Ideally, as data progress from nominal to ordinal to equal interval in mathematical character, association measures should simply incorporate the added properties into the format used at the lower levels. In this way ordinal measures of association would be the same as nominal measures with the fact of ordered data utilized. Interval measures would be the same as ordinal measures with the degree of ordered difference utilized. Such is hardly the case for current procedures. This chapter will present an approach to measure association such that a single basic logic is used regardless of the measurement level of the variables being associated. The logic is adapted, as indicated above, to