ReviewAnnual review of clinical psychology2023
The Questionable Practice of Partialing to Refine Scores on and Inferences About Measures of Psychological Constructs.
Review in Annual review of clinical psychology, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
19 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Temperament, personality, and psychopathology in youth: A preregistered multilevel meta-analytic review and preregistered large-scale replication and extension.Psychological bulletin · 2026Pooled it
- Anxiety and depression subtypes and their psychotherapy response: A network analysis of 33,675 patients.Psychological medicine · 2026Article
- The social ambivalence and disease model: Childhood trauma as an antecedent factor linking spousal ambivalence to inflammation.Health psychology : official journal of the Division of Health Psychology, American Psychological Association · 2026Article
- In the Beast Mode: Predator Self-Identifications as a Model of Disagreeable Functioning.Assessment · 2026Article
- Experiences of Discrimination and Alcohol Involvement Among Young Adults at the Intersection of Race/Ethnicity and Gender.Journal of racial and ethnic health disparities · 2025Article
- An exploratory study on disinhibition and interpersonal outcomes in daily life.Personality disorders · 2025Article
- Callous-unemotional traits, cognitive functioning, and externalizing problems in a propensity-matched sample from the ABCD study.Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines · 2025Article
- Online and Unkind: Examining the Personality Correlates of Online Political Incivility.Social science computer review · 2025Article
- Pornography Use, Moral Incongruence, Psychological Distress, and Sexual Satisfaction.Archives of sexual behavior · 2025Article
- Reactive and Proactive Aggression in Daily Life: An Exploratory Experience-Sampling Method Study.Aggressive behavior · 2025Article
- Functional connectivity heterogeneity and consequences for clinical and cognitive prediction: Stage 2 registered report.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- Antisocial personality traits as potential risk factors for cyberstalking: only aspects of psychopathy and narcissism matter.Psychiatry, psychology, and law : an interdisciplinary journal of the Australian and New Zealand Association of Psychiatry, Psychology and Law · 2025Article
- Causal inference on human behaviour.Nature human behaviour · 2024Review
- A Multi-Method Study of Interpersonal Complementarity and Mentalization.Journal of research in personality · 2024Article
- Loneliness, epigenetic age acceleration, and chronic health conditions.Psychology and aging · 2024Article
- Clarifying Relations Between Core Features of Psychopathy and Substance (Mis)use: A Replication and Extension in Two Large Independent Samples.Journal of personality disorders · 2024Article
- Genetic effects on variability in visual aesthetic evaluations are partially shared across visual domains.Communications biology · 2024Article
- How does loneliness "get under the skin" to become biologically embedded?Biodemography and social biologyReview
- Attention to Emotion and the Thought-Feeling Relationship: Evidence From a Stream of Consciousness Paradigm.Personality scienceArticle
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Partialing is a statistical approach researchers use with the goal of removing extraneous variance from a variable before examining its association with other variables. Controlling for confounds through analysis of covariance or multiple regression analysis and residualizing variables for use in subsequent analyses are common approaches to partialing in clinical research. Despite its intuitive appeal, partialing is fraught with undesirable consequences when predictors are correlated. After describing effects of partialing on variables, we review analytic approaches commonly used in clinical research to make inferences about the nature and effects of partialed variables. We then use two simulations to show how partialing can distort variables and their relations with other variables. Having concluded that, with rare exception, partialing is ill-advised, we offer recommendations for reducing or eliminating problematic uses of partialing. We conclude that the best alternative to partialing is to define and measure constructs so that it is not needed.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.