Surveys often include questions with options like "daily," "once a week", "a few times a month",..."once a year", "never". Or something like that. I understand why Qs are worded that way but I find them annoying to deal with. The coding clearly isn't continuous or even roughly continuous. But, I hate to just break the variable up into a bunch of dummies -- you get a lot of variables that way and you lose the fact that the categories are ordered.
What I often suggest doing is treating the variable as categorical, then treat it as continuous, and then do a test to see whether it is ok to treat it as continuous.
I am curious what other people do. I suspect a lot of times people just treat the variable as continuous. But are there other guidelines or suggestions on how to proceed?
What I often suggest doing is treating the variable as categorical, then treat it as continuous, and then do a test to see whether it is ok to treat it as continuous.
I am curious what other people do. I suspect a lot of times people just treat the variable as continuous. But are there other guidelines or suggestions on how to proceed?
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