A Computer Program for Determining the Correlation between Categorized Variables from a Bivariate Normal Distribution with a given Correlation

Abstract

Data from underlying (unmeasured) continuous variables are often categorized in the process of measurement. The program described in this paper can be used to determine the correlation which results from categorizing two variables which follow a bivariate normal distribution. Different numbers of categories for each variable (e.g., 2 x 4 or 7 x 6) may be used, with different proportions of scores in each category and for different values of the correlation in the bivariate normal distribution.