Solved – ANCOVA: ordinal covariate on SPSS

ancovaordinal-datapredictorspss

I'm trying to run an ANCOVA on SPSS with 3 variables: Gender, score 1, score 2.

I want to control for the possibility that gender has an effect the scores, in order to isolate just the relationship between score 1 and score 2.

However, I cannot enter gender as a covariate on SPSS as, by definition, it assumes covariates must be scalars.

So, how can I run my ANCOVA and make sure that gender isn't affecting my 2 other variables?

Best Answer

If you want to retain the nominal coding of the Gender variable, you can include it as a fixed factor, then go in "Model...", then select "Custom" (instead of "Full factorial"), and enter all main effects, and the 2-way interaction between score1 and score2, but not the interaction between Gender and either score1 and score2 (i.e., enter only the main effect for Gender).

Alternatively (and this is what I would suggest), you can recode your gender variable into dummy codes or effects code (or any other two values). For example, you could call your variable Female, and code males as 0, and females as 1, and set it as a "scale" variable. Then you could include it in the "Covariates" section.

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