CORRELATIONAL RESEARCH

Chapter 7

CORRELATIONAL RESEARCH

Used to describe the relationship between two or more naturally occurring (not experimentally manipulated) variables.

Is age related to political conservativism? Are highly extraverted people less afraid of rejection than less extraverted people? Is I.Q. related to reaction time?

CORRELATION COEFFICIENT

Correlation coefficient a statistic that indicates the degree to which two variables are related to one another in a linear fashion Pearson correlation coefficient (r) is the most commonly used measure of correlation

Ranges from -1.00 to +1.00 Magnitude and direction are meaningful

CORRELATION COEFFICIENT

Magnitude (-1 to 0 to +1) tells you strength

Values closer to 0 indicate weaker relationships. Values closer to 1 or +1 indicate stronger relationships.

Sign (+ or -) tells you direction

POSITIVE: As value of one variable increases, value of the other variable also increases. NEGATIVE: As value of one variable increases, value of the other variable decreases.

Exam Score

Exam Score

Time Spent Studying

Alcohol Use

CORRELATION IS A MEASURE OF EFFECT SIZE

small r = .10 medium r = .30 large r = .50

GRAPHIC REPRESENTATION OF CORRELATIONS

Scatter plot a graph of participants scores on two variables

When there is a perfect correlation all of the data will fall in a straight line

STRONG POSITIVE CORRELATION:

STRONG NEGATIVE CORRELATION:

NO CORRELATION:
(variables are not linearly related)

CORRELATIONS MEASURE LINEAR RELATIONSHIPS!

Linear: straight line
Income and house size

Nonlinear (curvilinear):

r=0

Learning Curve

Age and Extraversion

THE PEARSON CORRELATION ONLY INDEXES THE LINEAR RELATIONSHIP:

Image from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation

COVARIABILITY

Remember variability? (The extent to which scores vary from each other) Covariability = the extent to which two variables vary together

THE PEARSON CORRELATION

Measures the degree and the direction of the linear relationship between two variables r is the ratio of covariability to total variability

covariabil ity of X and Y r variablity of X and Y separatel y

COEFFICIENT OF DETERMINATION

r is not on a ratio scale:

Cannot directly add/subtract or multiply/divide rs r = .80 is not twice as strong as r = .40

Can square r to obtain the coefficient of determination (r2).

The proportion of variance in X explained by its relationship to Y (the proportion of shared variance) Ratio scale of measurement

.802 = .64 (64% of variance is shared) .402 = .16 (16% of variance is shared)

STATISTICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF R

A statistically significant r has a very low probability of being .00 in the population from which the sample came. Affected by three things: Sample size Magnitude of the correlation (effect size) Alpha or significance level

1. 2. 3.

Directional vs. nondirectional hypotheses

FACTORS THAT CAN DISTORT CORRELATION COEFFICIENTS

1.

Restricted range data in which participants scores are confined to a narrow range of the possible scores

Artificially lowers correlations

FACTORS THAT CAN DISTORT CORRELATION COEFFICIENTS

2.

Outliers scores so atypical that they might not belong with the same population.

A score is considered an outlier if it is more than 3 standard deviations away from the mean. On-line outliers fall in the same pattern as the rest of the data and tend to artificially inflate r. Off-line outliers fall outside of the pattern of the rest of the data and tend to artificially deflate r.

INFLUENCE OF OUTLIERS ON CORRELATION

FACTORS THAT DISTORT CORRELATION COEFFICIENTS

3.

Reliability of a Measure -- the less reliable a measure is, the lower its correlations with other measures will be.

CORRELATION AND CAUSALITY

Correlation does not equal causation!

X may cause Y.

1.

2.

Y may cause X.
A third variable may cause X and Y.

3.

Spurious correlation correlation between two variables due to their relation to other variables

A correlation between two variables does not imply that one causes the other, even with a perfect correlation (+/- 1.00).

CRITERIA FOR INFERRING CAUSALITY

Covariation changes in one variable are associated with changes in the other variable; Directionality the presumed causal variable preceded the presumed effect in time Extraneous variables all other variables that may affect the relationship between the two target variables are controlled or eliminated

Correlational research satisfies the first (and sometimes the second) criterion, but never the third. This is why experimental research is needed to establish causality!

PARTIAL CORRELATION

Partial correlation is the correlation between two variables with the influence of one of more other variables statistically removed. If a partial correlation between two variables (with the influence of a third variable removed) is significantly lower than the Pearson correlation between the two variables, then the correlation between them is at least partly due to the third variable (or to a variable associated with the third variable).

OTHER INDICES OF CORRELATION

Spearman rank-order correlation used when variables are measured on an ordinal scale (the numbers reflect the rank ordering of participants on some attribute) Phi coefficient used when both variables are dichotomous Point-biserial correlation used when only one of the variables is dichotomous