The objective of this research is to develop a family of fully nonparametric statistical methods and associated software for use in social sciences research. These procedures require minimal modeling assumptions, possess desirable invariance properties, will allow the analysis of all types of ordinal data (continuous, ordered categorical, and data with ties), and will also permit the data to be either independent or dependent (as, for example, in longitudinal studies). The software developed will consist of SAS macros and S-plus functions which will be made available to researchers in the social sciences through several World-Wide-Web sites.
