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      An analysis of U-Value as a measure of variability

      Kong, Xiuyuan; McEwan, James S.A.; Bizo, Lewis A.; Foster, T. Mary
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      An analysis of U-value as a measure of variability_final.pdf
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      DOI
       10.1007/s40732-017-0219-2
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      Kong, X., McEwan, J. S. A., Bizo, L. A., & Foster, T. M. (2017). An analysis of U-Value as a measure of variability. The Psychological Record, -online, 1–6. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40732-017-0219-2
      Permanent Research Commons link: https://hdl.handle.net/10289/11009
      Abstract
      The variability in behavior has frequently been assessed using a measure known as the U-value. Of concern in this article were the limits and constraints on U-value as a measure of variability. The relation between the U-value and aspects of variability was examined using three sets of simulated data. Our analysis demonstrates that the U-value as a measure of variability on its own fails to capture repetitive patterns in the sequence of responding. The U-value was shown to reflect the evenness of the distributions of responses across the categories/options used; however, when the number of categories actually used by the participant differed from the total number available, the relation between U-values and the number of categories allocated with responses was shown to be nonlinear. It was also shown that the same value of U can represent different levels of evenness in response distributions over categories, depending on the number of categories/options actually used. These constraints and limitations are discussed in relation to how researchers might report on behavioral variability.
      Date
      2017
      Type
      Journal Article
      Publisher
      The Association for Behavior Analysis International (ABAI)
      Rights
      © Association for Behavior Analysis International 2017. This is the author's accepted version. The final publication is available at Springer via dx.doi.org/10.1007/s40732-017-0219-2
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      • Arts and Social Sciences Papers [1423]
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