Ordinal Predictors in Linear Regression [Ordinal Independent Variables]

How can you include an ordinal independent variable in linear regression analysis?

An ordinal predictor regression can be implemented in different ways. There are rather simple and easy to implement techniques and very advanced approaches to include ordinal independent variables in regression models.

This video tutorial is going to show you some basic techniques you could easily implement for treating ordinal independent variables in regressions in order to write your bachelor's thesis or master's thesis.

In addition, this video will provide you with literature references for more advanced methods for dealing with ordinal predictors in regression if you decide to use more sophisticated (and much more difficult) techniques.

Content:
0:00 Start
1:07 Binary coding scheme ("staircase coding")
4:01 Problems with binary coding
5:13 Treating an ordinal predictor as an interval predictor
7:08 Likert items and Likert scales
8:32 Advanced methods (penalized regression with ordinal predictors, ordinal smoothing splines)

Here you can find the companion webpage with all literature sources mentioned in the video:

You can find my other statistics tutorials here:

[tywoods]

I spent a whole hour looking through my stat textbook (Field, 2018 and Pallant, 2020), google scholar and the search energy of my library trying a combination of terms until I stumble upon this video...thank you for this!

[nono-ydtw]

Hi! What are the drawbacks of using an ordinal IV as a continuous variable? Do you know any resources on this? Thank you.

[stephaniehoule]

Hello, I'm trying to understand the best way to include an ordinal predictor in a multinomial logistic regression, do the approaches you discuss in this video apply to logistic regression? My variable is Education and has 5 levels (less than high school, completed high school, completed college/trade school, completed university, graduate school or higher).

[juannachon]

Hi, could you share the script for the OLS model specification used in the staircase coding approach please?

[JuanAntonioNelson]

How would you interpret the Y intercept in these cases?