[R-lang] Re: "Zero" problem with lmer

[Marie Coppola]

Dear Daniel,

Thanks for your response. To clarify, one of the three handling responses
was real (the one in the Agent condition for the Lexical Items).

Yes, I can totally see this as getting a bit carried away with tools.... To
give you a bit of context, this is a subset of a longitudinal data set, and
it was just the clearest example of the zero problem. There are other groups
I am trying to compare this group to, where there is some variation, and I
haven't been able to include these invariant conditions in the model, so
it's been hard to know whether I have a basis for claiming that the other
groups are similar or different. So that's my motivation for trying to
resolve this issue. Because we have such a small sample size (n=3 subjects
for the other two groups), I haven't pursued the non-parametric route,
because it appeared to me tha the appropriate tests did not have
significance values defined for n's that small. Hence my plunge into the
world of lmer()....

I've written the results in a hybrid fashion, appealing to qualitative
arguments (as you did in your response) and applying the quantitative tools
where there is variation. It seems to have worked out all right in the end.

Thanks again,
Marie

On Sun, Oct 10, 2010 at 7:01 AM, Daniel Ezra Johnson <
danielezrajohnson@gmail.com> wrote:

> I think sometimes we get carried away with our wonderful tools like lmer().
>
> > , , Construction = Classifier
> >
> >           Agent
> > Handshape  agent no_agent
> >   handling    36        1 (added)
> >   object      27       65
> >
> > , , Construction = Lexical_item
> >
> >           Agent
> > Handshape  agent no_agent
> >   handling     1        1 (added)
> >   object      45       54
>
> For this data:
>
> a) in the Classifier construction, it is very clear that Agent favors
> Handling, compared to No Agent
>
> b) in the Lexical Item construction, there is no evidence of an effect
> of Agent/No Agent on Handshape (because Handshape is largely or
> totally invariant*)
>
> You can call this an interaction between Agent and Classifier, if you
> wanted...
>
> *Are all three 1's "added" or is one of them real?
>
> Either way, you're very close to a situation where Handling only
> occurs in one of the four cells, only in Classifier/Agent.
>
> I don't think an extreme distribution like that lends itself to (aka
> needs) ordinary quantitative regression analysis (and it's also not
> clear how there _could be_ a Subject effect).
>
> Just my two cents,
> Daniel
>
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