Hostname: page-component-745bb68f8f-d8cs5 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-01-07T18:58:55.458Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

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
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

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

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Cochran, W. G.. The distribution of quadratic forms in a normal applications to the analysis of variance. Proc. Cambridge Phil. Soc., 1934, 30, 178–191CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cronbach, L. J., Gleser, G. C.. Assessing similarity between profiles. Psychol. Bull., 1953, 50, 456–473CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gaier, E. L., Lee, M. C.. Pattern analysis: the configural approach to predictive measurement. Psychol. Bull., 1953, 50, 140–148CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Harris, Chester W.. Relations among factors of raw, deviation, and double-centered score matrices. J. exp. Educ., 1953, 22, 53–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Osgood, C. E., Suci, G. J.. A measure of relation determined by both mean difference and profile information. Psychol. Bull., 1952, 49, 251–262CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rao, C. R.. Advanced statistical methods in biometric research, New York: Wiley, 1952Google Scholar
Thorndike, R. L.. Who belongs in the family?. Psychometrika, 1953, 18, 267–276CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Webster, H.. A note on profile similarity. Psychol. Bull., 1952, 49, 538–539CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed