Before conducting the multivariate prediction of the action control framework, we examined potential demographic (age, gender, income, occupational status, education), home environment (presence of a back yard), and dog (breed size) characteristics as covariates using analysis of variance and chi-square analyses. Significant covariates (p < 0.05) were carried forward to the main analyses. For the main analyses, prediction of action control category membership used discriminant function analysis. Associations with a significant discriminant function used r = 0.20 as the minimum recommended effect size for the social sciences based on recent recommendations . For predictors that had a meaningful correlation with the discriminant function, follow-up univariate F-tests and Tukey post-hoc difference tests were conducted similar to prior work with the action control framework . Significance was set at p < 0.05, but effect sizes were used to aid in the interpretation of the inferential statistics results. Specifically, we used d = 0.30 as the minimum recommended effect size because the estimate is between Ferguson’s  d = 0.41 and Cohen’s  d = 0.20 recommendations. Our a priori power analysis of this prediction equation suggested that we required a sample size of N = 166, considering our estimated small effect size, p-level (0.05), an estimated power of 0.80, and the seven M-PAC predictors with an estimated two additional covariates.