Goodman’s and Kruskal’s Gamma Although Spearman’s Rho can be used in most cases involving ordinal data, if you have of ties, you may ‘lots’ have to use Gamma as an alternative. What’s a tie? A tie is when many many individuals will have the same value of a variable, or combination of variables. Why would there be lots of ties? Think back to the homework; recall the General Happiness variable from the GSS there were only three categories – for this ordinal variable and most people selected ‘Pretty Happy’ they were all tied. … Gamma in SPSS
Goodman’s and Kruskal’s Gamma Although Spearman’s Rho can be used in most cases involving ordinal data, if you have ‘lots’ of ties, you may have to use Gamma as an alternative. What’s a tie? A tie is when many many individuals will have the same value of a variable, or combination of variables. Why would there be lots of ties? Think back to the homework; recall the General Happiness variable from the GSS – there were only three categories for this ordinal variable and most people selected ‘Pretty Happy’ … they were all tied. Gamma in SPSS
Stat203_W13L1.docx