Median-Splits—Theyre Probably not a Good Idea.docVIP

Median-Splits—Probably not a Good Idea Psychologists and others often like to think in terms of groups or classes of people. We like to call some people Extroverted, and others Introverted, or we like to classify people as Type A or Type B personalities, and so on. And, in fact, there may be very good reason to think of people in this way, as opposed to thinking of them as spread out along a single dimension of extroversion. And if we are going to think of people this way, it is sometimes very tempting to actually classify them this way. For example, we administer a scale of Optimism, and then use a median-split to label the people above the median as Optimists, and those below the median as Pessimists. We then run a t test between the two groups on some dependent measure, concluding, for example, that Optimists have more friends than Pessimists. We sometimes even complicate the situation by having two independent variables. We might also pass out a scales of Extroversion and Optimism, and again use the median to divide people into Extroverts and Introverts, as well as Optimists and Pessimists. We might then think of this as a factorial design, and use a two-way analysis of variance to examine number of friends as a function of both dichotomous variables and their interaction. The analysis might reveal that both Optimism/Pessimism, and Extrovert/Introvert are related to the number of friends that an individual has, and there might even be an interaction between the two variables. But, is the design just described an acceptable way to analyze the data? Certainly it is a common method, but that doesn’t necessarily make it right. In fact, there is a lot to suggest that this is not really the best way to proceed, especially when we have a factorial design. The Simplest Case—the One-Way Design. The most common use of the median-split is to create two groups, who are then compared on some dependent variable. Just for an example, we might compare Optimists and Pessimists