Norman Cliff (born September 1, 1930) is an American psychologist. He received his Ph.D. from

Princeton Princeton University is a private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the ni ...

psychometrics Psychometrics is a field of study within psychology concerned with the theory and technique of measurement. Psychometrics generally refers to specialized fields within psychology and education devoted to testing, measurement, assessment, and ...

in 1957. After research positions in the

US Public Health Service The United States Public Health Service (USPHS or PHS) is a collection of agencies of the Department of Health and Human Services concerned with public health, containing nine out of the department's twelve operating divisions. The Assistant S ...

and at

Educational Testing Service Educational Testing Service (ETS), founded in 1947, is the world's largest private nonprofit educational testing and assessment organization. It is headquartered in Lawrence Township, Mercer County, New Jersey, Lawrence Township, New Jersey, b ...

he joined the

University of Southern California , mottoeng = "Let whoever earns the palm bear it" , religious_affiliation = Nonsectarian—historically Methodist , established = , accreditation = WSCUC , type = Private research university , academic_affiliations = , endowment = $8.1 ...

in 1962. He has had a number of research interests, including quantification of cognitive processes, scaling and measurement theory, computer-interactive psychological measurement, multivariate statistics, and ordinal methods. One of his major contributions to psychometrics was the method for rotation of canonical components. Asserting that much of psychological data have only ordinal justification, Cliff also published various papers and a book on ordinal methods for research. On the one hand this included extensions to the established ordinal methods for correlating data (i.e.

Kendall's tau In statistics, the Kendall rank correlation coefficient, commonly referred to as Kendall's τ coefficient (after the Greek letter τ, tau), is a statistic used to measure the ordinal association between two measured quantities. A τ test is a ...

Spearman's rank correlation coefficient In statistics, Spearman's rank correlation coefficient or Spearman's ''ρ'', named after Charles Spearman and often denoted by the Greek letter \rho (rho) or as r_s, is a nonparametric measure of rank correlation ( statistical dependence betwee ...

). However, on the other hand, Cliff also suggested that there are viable and robust ordinal alternatives to mean comparisons. He introduced a measure of proportional difference (or ''dominance'') between two sets of data often referred to as Cliff's delta. He has been president of the Psychometric Society and of the Society for Multivariate Experimental Psychology. Now an Emeritus Professor, he lives in

New Mexico ) , population_demonym = New Mexican ( es, Neomexicano, Neomejicano, Nuevo Mexicano) , seat = Santa Fe , LargestCity = Albuquerque , LargestMetro = Tiguex , OfficialLang = None , Languages = English, Spanish ( New Mexican), Navajo, Ke ...

References

* Cliff, N. (1966). Orthogonal Rotation to Congruence. ''Psychometrika,'' 31 (1), pp. 33–42. * Cliff, N., & Krus, D. J. (1976). Interpretation of canonical analysis: Rotated vs. unrotated solutions. ''Psychometrika,'' 41, 35–4
(Request reprint).
* Cliff, N. (1987). ''Analyzing Multivariate Data''. San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. * Cliff, N. (1993). Dominance statistics: Ordinal analyses to answer ordinal questions. ''Psychological Bulletin, 114'', 494–509. * Cliff, N. (1996). ''Ordinal Methods for Behavioral Data Analysis''. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. * Cliff, N. (1996). Answering ordinal questions with ordinal data using ordinal statistics. ''Multivariate Behavioral Research, 31'', 331–350. * Long, J. D., Feng, D., & Cliff, N., (2003). Ordinal analysis of behavioral data. In J. Schinka & W. F. Velicer (Eds.), ''Research Methods in Psychology. Volume 2 of Handbook of Psychology'' (I. B. Weiner, Editor-in-Chief). New York: John Wiley & Sons. American psychologists Living people 1930 births Wayne State University alumni Princeton University alumni Psychometrika editors {{US-psychologist-stub