Indexes

- [Instructor] Welcome to chapter three, section four,…where I continue teaching you strategies…of different things you can do…if your dependent continuous variable…is not meeting assumptions.…Another strategy is to make an index.…In the last section, I showed you…two potential fixes for continuous dependent variables…that do not meet assumptions,…and those are categorization and log transformation.…In categorization we essentially turned…a continuous variable into a categorical variable,…and in log transformation,…we just took a log of the variable.…

But now, I'm going to show you another alternative,…which is making an index.…In this case, you throw out the variable altogether…and make a brand new variable…out of other variables that approximate it.…Please note that my demonstration cannot focus…on using an index to create a sleep variable,…which is what we want as our continuous dependent variable.…That's because there are hardly any other questions…about sleep in the BRFSS core questions.…You need other questions on the same subject…