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Theodossiou articulates that unemployment has a negative effect on psychological well-being, and then by natural flow of reasoning, he further made the assumption that most unemployment was involuntary.  Theodossiou says that the parameters of measuring the psychological wellbeing were not limited to “caseness scores” which are numerical values associated with some type of psychological testing. He did his analysis by collecting categorical data (ordinally ranked in 4 levels). His categories were; feeling under strain, losing confidence,thinking of being a worthless person, as well as happiness levels and ability and motivation to do day to day activities.  Each ordinal ranking was associated with a value, [e.i. not at all (1), no more than usual (2), rather more than usual (3), much more than usual (4)]. I think that these categorical variables are accurate/useful for this collecting data because the data is subjective to the person answering the questions- and the researchers were looking for subjective data.

Additionally, as Elizabeth said in her blog post, even when looking at the data across various subgroups (age, gender, married/divorced, etc) as to avoid Simpson’s paradox, it all seemed to be relatively following the same trend, but the reasoning behind each trend could be explained differently.   I would agree with Elizabeth that this article does a good job of categorizing data, and analyzing based on many variables and across many groups.