🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <thompson.724607838@daphne.socsci.umn.edu> thompson@atlas.socsci.umn.edu writes:
>Perhaps someone interested in the levels of measurement question might
>be able to help me too.
>
>I have been acting as informal statistical consultant for my wife, who
>is a physician with only an elementary statistical background, in a
>project where she wants measures of association between a fairly large
>number of binary variables in a sample with n=500 and in a subsample
>with n = 260.  (These numbers may increase in the future.)  
>
>We have been calculating standard Pearson correlation coefficients,
>which to my way of thinking are as good as anything else at describing
>binary associations, since scaling is not an issue for binary data.  I
>
[....]
>
>If you were in my shoes would you stick with the Pearson correlations
>or do something different?  If the latter, would you provide a
>reference please.
>
>Related and more interesting question:
>
>What is "the right way" to do this from the point of view of
>statistical theory?
>--

I would compute polychoric coefficients - conceptually they are
correlations of latent normal variables for which below a threshold we
observe the case being in one category and above we observe it in
another category.