Some of the measures commonly used to describe association between two ordinal categorical variables, controlling for the effects of other ordinal categorical variables, are compared in their closeness to a corresponding conditional measure for an underlying jointly continuous distribution. Partial gamma and Kendall's partial tau are observed to be poorer than a weighted average of the Kendall's τb's from separate control levels, according to this criterion. The asymptotic sampling distribution of a particular weighted average measure is derived, and the behavior of the mean and asymptotic variance of such a measure is analyzed as the categorical variables are more finely measured.