The Analysis of Contingency Tables

Much of the data collected in medicine and the social sciences is categorical, for example, sex, marital status, blood group, whether a smoker or not and so on, rather than interval-scaled. Frequently the researcher collecting such data is interested in the relationships or associations between pairs, or between a set of such categorical variables; often the data is displayed in the form of a contingency table for example, smoker versus non-smoker against death from lung cancer or death from some other cause. This text gives a comprehensive account of the analysis of such tables, written at a level suitable for the applied researcher. The first edition of The Analysis of Contingency Tables arose from Professor A.E. Maxwell’s earlier text, Analysing Qualitative Data . In this new edition, more material is included that those methods which have developed over the last decade or so, for example, logistic regression models for tables with ordered categories and for response variables with more than two categories. A brief account is given of the increasingly important technique, correspondence analysis. The methods of analysis described in this book should be relevant to research workers and graduate students dealing with data from surveys, particularly in the area of psychiatry, social sciences and psychology.