Introduction to Basic Statistics

As a consumer of research, you know that relationships are of critical importance. You must first know if a relationship exists between two variables before you can determine if one variable may account for another. In this week’s Learning Resources, you learned about correlations, which are used to determine if two variables are related to one another. You also learned that you cannot infer causation from a significant correlation alone. For example, you might find that years of education and salary are related, but that does not tell you if more education causes your salary to increase. In correlational studies, you cannot show that one variable causes a change in another variable. To determine causation, an experimental design is needed. However, correlations can demonstrate that as one variable increases, another tends to increase as well (positive relationship). You also may find that as one variable increases, the other tends to decrease (negative relationship). You may even find that there is no relationship at all between variables.