Measure Of Association

measure of association, in statistics, any of various factors or coefficients used to quantify a relationship between two or more variables. Measures of association are used in various fields of research but are especially common in the areas of epidemiology and psychology, where they frequently are used to quantify relationships between exposures and diseases or behaviours.

A measure of association may be determined by any of several different analyses, including correlation analysis and regression analysis. (Although the terms correlation and association are often used interchangeably, correlation in a stricter sense refers to linear correlation, and association refers to any relationship between variables.) The method used to determine the strength of an association depends on the characteristics of the data for each variable. Data may be measured on an interval/ratio scale, an ordinal/rank scale, or a nominal/categorical scale. These three characteristics can be thought of as continuous, integer, and qualitative categories, respectively.