New Features page Normal Scores Normal scores may be computed for ordinal and continuous variables. For continuous variables these give the possibility of effectively normalizing non-normal variables.
Normal scores provide a way to deal with non-normality in small and moderate sample sizes.
The analysis of continuous non-normal variables in structural equation models is problematic in several ways. Sometimes a reasonable compromise is to use ML despite the non-normality and correct for the bias in standard errors, but this too requires a very large sample. Another solution to non-normality is to normalize the variables before analysis. Normal scores offer an effective way of normalizing a continuous variable for which the origin and unit of measurement have no intrinsic meaning, such as test scores. The general syntax for the NScores line is NS varlist where varlist is a list of variables.