Running head: STATISTICAL APPROACHES FOR HIGHLY SKEWED DATA 1 (in press) Journal of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology Statistical Approaches for Highly Skewed Data: Evaluating Relations between Child Maltreatment and Young Adults’ Non-Suicidal Self-injury Ana Gonzalez-Blanks, PhD Jessie M. Bridgewater, MA *Tuppett M. Yates, PhD Department of Psychology University of California, Riverside Acknowledgments: We gratefully acknowledge Dr. Chandra Reynolds who provided generous instruction and consultation throughout the execution of the analyses reported herein. *Please address correspondence to: Tuppett M. Yates, Department of Psychology, University of California, Riverside CA, 92521. Email:
[email protected]. STATISTICAL APPROACHES FOR HIGHLY SKEWED DATA 2 Abstract Objective: Clinical phenomena often feature skewed distributions with an overabundance of zeros. Unfortunately, empirical methods for dealing with this violation of distributional assumptions underlying regression are typically discussed in statistical journals with limited translation to applied researchers. Therefore, this investigation compared statistical approaches for addressing highly skewed data as applied to the evaluation of relations between child maltreatment and non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI). Method: College students (N = 2,651; 64.2% female; 85.2% non-White) completed the Child Abuse and Trauma Scale and the Functional Assessment of Self-Mutilation. Statistical models were applied to cross-sectional data to provide illustrative comparisons across predictions to a) raw, highly skewed NSSI outcomes, b) natural log, square-root, and inverse NSSI transformations to reduce skew, c) zero-inflated Poisson (ZIP) and negative-binomial zero- inflated (NBZI) regression models to account for both disproportionate zeros and skewness in the NSSI data, and d) the skew-t distribution to model NSSI skewness.