Interpreting Kendall’s Tau and Tau-U for single-case experimental designs

By Daniel F. Brossart, Vanessa Laird, T. Armstrong. Cogent Psychology, 2018

192 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Tau (τ), a nonparametric rank order correlation statistic, has been applied to single-case experimental designs with promising results. Tau-U, a family of related coefficients, partitions variance associated with changes in trend and level. By examining within-phase trend and across-phase differences separately with Tau-U, single-case investigators may gain useful descriptive and inferential insights about their data. Heuristic data sets were used to explore Tau-U’s conceptual foundation, and 115 published single-case data sets were analyzed to demonstrate that Tau-U coefficients perform predictably when they are well understood. An understanding of Tau-U’s theoretical basis and unique limitations will help investigators select the appropriate statistical method to test their hypotheses and interpret their results appropriately. Limitations of Tau-U include as follows: vague or inconsistent Tau-U terminology in published single-case research; arithmetic problems that lead to unexpected and difficult-to-interpret results, especially when controlling for baseline trend; Tau-U methods are difficult to graph visually, and a comparison with visual raters found that several Tau-U effect size statistics are weakly correlated with visual analysis.

Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Food Science, Management Science and Operations Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/adb0992b70997b0eb8c0fa66876e598eb4a51aca

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In Developmental and Educational Psychology

  1. D. Test
  2. Catherine H. Fowler

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