Most theories in the social sciences are verbal and provide ordinal-level predictions for data. For example, a theory might predict that performance is better in one condition than another, but not by how much. One way of gaining additional specificity is to posit many ordinal constraints that hold simultaneously. For example a theory might predict an effect in one condition, a larger effect in another, and none in a third. We show how common theoretical positions naturally lead to multiple ordinal constraints. To assess whether multiple ordinal constraints hold in data, we adopt a Bayesian model comparison approach. The result is an inferential system that is custom-tuned for the way social scientists conceptualize theory, and that is more intuitive and informative than current linear-model approaches.
Examining Models of Second Language Knowledge: A Model-Comparison Approach