Measures of Nominal-Ordinal Association

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].. Taylor & Francis, Ltd. and American Statistical Association are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of the American Statistical Association. Measures are formulated for summarizing the strength of association between a nominal variable and an ordered categorical variable. The measures are differences or ratios of probabilities of events concerning two types of pairs of observations. They can be used to describe the degree of difference between two or more groups on an ordinal response variable. The measures summarize and complement the results of fitting models to nominal-ordinal cross-classification tables, especially when a single structural model form cannot be found that adequately describes an entire table or set of tables.