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Characteristics of Two Measures of Profile Similarity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2025

Chester W. Harris
Chester W. Harris*
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin
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Abstract

Analogs of Pearson's coefficient of racial likeness and of Mahalanobis' distance measure have been proposed as descriptive statistics for comparing two individuals. This paper shows that two different definitions of “uncorrelated” variables—one associated with an inverse transformation and the other with a principal-axis transformation—give rise to these two descriptive statistics. The effects of putting the data into certain forms, such as equalizing the variances of the variables or equalizing the means of the persons, prior to using either of the two transformations, are discussed.

Type
Original Paper
Information
Psychometrika , Volume 20 , Issue 4 , December 1955 , pp. 289 - 297
Copyright
Copyright © 1955 The Psychometric Society

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