A researcher's guide to regression, discretization, and median splits of continuous variables

We comment on Iacobucci, Posavac, Kardes, Schneider, and Popovich (2015) by evaluating the practice of discretizing continuous variables. We show that dichotomizing a continuous variable via the median split procedure or otherwise and analyzing the resulting data via ANOVA involves a large number of costs that can be avoided by preserving the continuous nature of the variable and analyzing the data via linear regression. As a consequence, we...