Chunk #41 — Reasons to be Concerned about the Published cGxE Literature — Problems with the Recipe: Statistical Concerns in cGxE Research — The importance of scale
between measurement points or simply reflect differences in relative magnitude. This is true of measures of both behavioral outcomes (e.g., a depression score) and environments (e.g., family function, peer deviance, neighborhood disintegration). The scale of measurement matters profoundly in interaction research because evidence for an interaction can change solely depending upon arbitrary choice of scale (L. J. Eaves, 2006). For example, predictors that combine multiplicatively to influence the outcome variable will combine additively if the outcome is log-transformed. In such situations, the significance of the interaction term depends on how the outcome is scaled which, in most behavioral research, is arbitrary.
