At the most abstract: anything on which things may have different values. Typically in our field these are things on which people may have different values: height, weight, age, pre-therapy questionnaire scores are all examples of “continuous” variables in that there are many possible scores (if the questionnaire is any good!) By contrast “attended” is a binary variable describing a therapy session: someone either did attend or not (whereas lateness is a continuous variable).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Generally in our field a variable may have missing values<\/strong>, e.g. where someone did not complete a measure. Continuous variables are often separated into ratio<\/strong>, interval<\/strong> and ordinal<\/strong> though the distinction is often overvalued. Binary variables are a particular set among categorical variables and categorical variables, for example, modality of therapy, may have a number of values (greater than two otherwise they are binary categorical variables) and there is no clear ordering of the values.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Missing values Nothing here yet!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" At the most abstract: anything on which things may have different values. Typically in our field these are things on which people may have different values: height, weight, age, pre-therapy questionnaire scores are all examples of “continuous” variables in that there are many possible scores (if the questionnaire is any good!) By contrast “attended” is … Continue reading Variable<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"doc_category":[18],"glossaries":[],"doc_tag":[],"knowledge_base":[],"class_list":["post-1883","docs","type-docs","status-publish","hentry","doc_category-om-book"],"year_month":"2026-04","word_count":162,"total_views":"1160","reactions":{"happy":"0","normal":"0","sad":"0"},"author_info":{"name":"chris","author_nicename":"chris","author_url":"https:\/\/www.psyctc.org\/psyctc\/author\/chris\/"},"doc_category_info":[{"term_name":"All OM book glossary entries","term_url":"https:\/\/www.psyctc.org\/psyctc\/glossary\/non-knowledgebase\/om-book\/"}],"doc_tag_info":[],"knowledge_base_info":[],"knowledge_base_slug":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.psyctc.org\/psyctc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/docs\/1883","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.psyctc.org\/psyctc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/docs"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.psyctc.org\/psyctc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/docs"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.psyctc.org\/psyctc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.psyctc.org\/psyctc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1883"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.psyctc.org\/psyctc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/docs\/1883\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1884,"href":"https:\/\/www.psyctc.org\/psyctc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/docs\/1883\/revisions\/1884"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.psyctc.org\/psyctc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1883"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"doc_category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.psyctc.org\/psyctc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/doc_category?post=1883"},{"taxonomy":"glossaries","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.psyctc.org\/psyctc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/glossaries?post=1883"},{"taxonomy":"doc_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.psyctc.org\/psyctc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/doc_tag?post=1883"},{"taxonomy":"knowledge_base","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.psyctc.org\/psyctc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/knowledge_base?post=1883"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Try also …<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Ratio variables
Interval variables
Ordinal variables
Distribution<\/p>\n\n\n\nChapters<\/h4>\n\n\n\n