Define Floor Ceiling Effects

The ceiling effect is one type of scale attenuation effect.

Define floor ceiling effects.

A floor effect is when most of your subjects score near the bottom. In pharmacology a ceiling effect is the point at which an independent variable which is the variable being manipulated is no longer affecting the dependent variable which is the variable being measured. The term ceiling effect has two distinct meanings referring to the level at which an independent variable no longer has an effect on a dependent variable or to the level above which variance in an independent variable is no longer measured or estimated. The inability of a test to measure or discriminate below a certain point usually because its items are too difficult.

The specific application varies slightly in differentiating between two areas of use for this term. Ceiling effect is used to describe a situation that occurs in both pharmacological and statistical research. In statistics a floor effect also known as a basement effect arises when a data gathering instrument has a lower limit to the data values it can reliably specify. In layperson terms your questions are too hard for the group you are testing.

The floor effect is a test measure that won t go below a certain point. Let s talk about floor and ceiling effects for a minute. The other scale attenuation effect is the floor effect the ceiling effect is observed when an independent variable no longer has an effect on a dependent variable or the level above which variance in an independent variable is no longer measurable. The other scale attenuation effect is the ceiling effect.

An example of use in the first area a ceiling effect. It essentially describes when the dependent variable has leveled out and is no longer responding to the independent variable.