For several years now my book Analysing Qualitative Data has been in need of revision. Since it was first published in 1961, and in part perhaps because of it, a great deal of new and interesting work on the analysis of contingency tables has been published. Mr. Brian Everitt kindly undertook to do the revision but, when he came to review recent literature, it became apparent that a mere renovation of the original text would not be enough; the amount of new work was not only extensive but also made obsolete many of the older methods. In consequence, and with the agreement of the publishers, it was decided that the revised version should in effect be a new book. That it is so is not strikingly evident in the first two chapters of the present text which, by way of introduction, cover old ground. Thereafter, the increased scope of new methods becomes abundantly apparent. This can be illustrated by a single example. When the Iiterature up to 1961 was reviewed the big disappointment was the paucity and inadequacy of methods then available for the analysis of multidimensional tables, and they are the rule rather than the exception in research work in the social sciences.
Much of the data collected in medicine and the social sciences is categorical, for example, sex, marital status, blood group, whether a smoker or not and so on, rather than interval-scaled. Frequently the researcher collecting such data is interested in the relationships or associations between pairs, or between a set of such categorical variables; often the data is displayed in the form of a contingency table for example, smoker versus non-smoker against death from lung cancer or death from some other cause. This text gives a comprehensive account of the analysis of such tables, written at a level suitable for the applied researcher. The first edition of "The Analysis of Contingency Tables" arose from Professor A.E. Maxwell's earlier text, "Analysing Qualitative Data". In this new edition, more material is included that those methods which have developed over the last decade or so, for example, logistic regression models for tables with ordered categories and for response variables with more than two categories. A brief account is given of the increasingly important technique, correspondence analysis. The methods of analysis described in this book should be relevant to research workers and graduate students dealing with data from surveys, particularly in the area of psychiatry, social sciences and psychology.