Methodological Issues in Absenteeism Research: Multiple Absence Measures and Multivariate Normality

Four methods for inducing or testing for multivariate normality when using multiple measures of absenteeism are described.They are the elimination of multivariate outliers, the transformation of absence measures to approximate multivariate normality, testing for univariate normality, and testing for multivariate normality.Evidence indicating that application of these methods can enhance the validity of absenteeism studies is presented.