Effect sizes for contrasts of estimated marginal effects

Abstract

The statistical literature is replete with calls to report standardized measures of effect size alongside traditional p-values and null hypothesis tests. While effect-size measures such as Cohen’s d and Hedges’s g are straightforward to calculate for t tests, this is not the case for parameters in more complex linear models, where traditional effect-size measures such as η 2 and ω 2 face limitations. After a review of effect sizes and their implementation in Stata, I introduce the community-contributed command mces. This postestimation command reports standardized effect-size statistics for dichotomous comparisons of marginal-effect contrasts obtained from margins and mimrgns, including with complex samples, for continuous outcome variables. mces provides Stata users the ability to report straightforward estimates of effect size in many modeling applications.