SOAN 2120 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Dependent And Independent Variables, List Of Statistical Packages, Subculture

• School: University of Guelph
• Department: Sociology and Anthropology
• Course: SOAN 2120
• Professor: D Walters

Document Summary

Scatterplots play an important role when exploring the relationship between two quantitative variables (gives us a visual representation) They allow us to identify problem cases, the form of the relationship, and have a preliminary estimate of the strength of the relationship. Only when the relationship is linear does it make sense to use the correlation coefficient. The correlation coefficient is a good summary measure of the direction and strength of the linear relationships (numerical representation) It ranges from -1 (perfect negative linear relationship) to +1 (perfect positive linear relationship) 0 means no linear relationship. If it"s a coding error, fix it and rerun the analysis. Johnny chaos - use his right big toe instead of him having no left big toe. If it"s an inaccurate representation, remove them from the study. Correlation is a necessary but not based on causality. We infer a causal relationship based on our understanding of the temporal relationship between the variables.