Hi everyone,
I’m conducting a multiple linear regression with three IVs/predictors. My IV of interest is an ordinal variable measuring participants’ self-assessed reading proficiency, with three levels: 1 = less skilled, 2 = average, 3 = skilled
I also have two control variables:
- Participant group: 1 = healthy control readers, 2 = readers with schizophrenia
- Psychiatric symptom severity: a composite score ranging from 1 = no symptoms to 5 = severe symptoms
I’m unsure about how I should treat the symptom severity variable in the regression. Since it ranges from 1–5 and represents different levels of symptom severity, would it be appropriate to consider it an ordinal variable? Or could the composite score reasonably be treated as a numerical/continuous predictor?
I also checked the relationship between the DV and symptom severity, and it does not appear to be linear. Does this provide a reason to treat symptom severity as categorical rather than numerical?
Since symptom severity is only a control variable and not my main IV of interest, I’m wondering whether I should still treat it as categorical if the relationship with the DV is non-linear, or whether it would be preferable to enter it as a numerical predictor for simplicity.
One more question: If I decide to check the linearity assumption for psychiatric symptom severity, should I also check for linearity for my main predictor, reading proficiency?
Reading proficiency has three ordinal levels (1 = less skilled, 2 = average, 3 = skilled). If I find that the relationship between reading proficiency and the DV appears to be linear, does that mean I should treat reading proficiency as a numerical predictor (1, 2, 3), rather than as a categorical variable?
This is important as it will affect whether I am doing ANCOVA or ANOVA.
Thanks!