Cluster Analysis: An Introduction in Psychological Contexts

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In market research, companies want to know where shoppers will be most likely to buy their product. In medicine, geneticists study the genome and gene expression to determine a priori who may develop Alzheimer’s, survive cancer, or have amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), or Lou Gehrig’s disease. In psychiatry, physicians have examined patient response patterns on depression questionnaires to differentiate those patients with chronic, personality-stable depression from those with situation-specific or acute depression. Hundreds of additional examples can be found demonstrating the application of cluster analysis (e.g., Aldenderfer & Blashfield, 1984; Everitt, Landau, Leese & Stahl, 2011).
Practitioners in the fields of psychology, biology, physiology, sociology, astronomy, and many other disciplines utilize taxonomy—the practice of classifying information or objects into generally similar groups based on their characteristics (Everitt et al., 2011). The researcher collects data (or if lucky enough, he or she has access to some data set), then researcher examines data looking for a specific pattern within the results; that search is a cluster analysis. The analysis may yield internally homogeneous groups of data, or clusters (e.g., having little variability within the group’s characteristics), externally separated from the other clusters (Everitt et al., 2011). If the researcher is only interested in working with (or targeting) those specific groups, then the cluster analysis can inform him or her whether those specific groups do, in fact, exist. Individuals having characteristics in common implies a similarity, for example Caucasian mothers who have a high school education, type of material in pottery from Ancient Greece...

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