Social science research often entails the comparison of two or more groups. For example, researchers may explore differences between sexes, races, ethnicities, sexual identities, treatment conditions, diagnostic categories, or various other grouping variables. While there are a number of ways to approach these comparisons, applied social science researchers often become comfortable with only one or two and may lack the time to learn or investigate others that may be more appropriate for their research questions. This article presents discriminant analysis as one of these alternative approaches. More specifically, it describes descriptive discriminant analysis in greater detail, including an example using SPSS (Version 11.0) output.
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