A picture is worth a thousand derivations and symbols. The organization of this book and the topics included mirror these goals, as does my emphasis on figures. I am especially concerned with providing the student with an intuitive understanding of correlation that will enable him to better comprehend the use of correlation coefficients in the literature, while providing material helpful for applying the correlation coefficient to his own work.Ĭonveying understanding and facilitating application are my aims. Therefore, the purpose of this book is to convey an understanding of the correlation coefficient to students that will be generally useful. This is the most widely used technique for assessing correlations and is the basis for techniques determining mathematical functions (such as regression analysis) or patterns of interdependence (such as factor analysis).Īlthough much used, however, the correlation coefficient 1 is not widely understood by students and teachers, and even those applying the correlation in advanced research. Here I will deal with one such measure, called the product moment correlation coefficient. No wonder, then, that scientists have tried to make the concept of correlation more precise, to measure and to quantitatively compare correlations. "Birds of a feather flock together." "Time heals all wounds." "Power kills and absolute power kills absolutely." Or at a different level: "National cohesion increases in wartime." "Prolonged severe inflation disorders society." "Institutional power aggrandizes until checked by opposing institutional power." Reflecting this interrelatedness, our theories and ideas about phenomena usually are based on assumed correlations. Sometimes we call these relationships cause and effect, sometimes we generalize them into assumed laws, and sometimes we simply call them natural or social uniformities or regularities. We exist in a field of relatedness: i.e., we come to understand the world around us through the multifold, interlaced and intersecting correlations it manifests. Whatever the framework within which we order phenomena, however, that reality we perceive is of dependence, concomitance, covariation, coincidence, concurrence or of independence, disassociation, or disconnectedness. Our knowledge is a dialectical balance between that sensory reality bearing on us, and our reaching out and imposing on this reality structure and framework. Of course, many of our concepts may be apriori, our frameworks may be projected onto phenomena and create order, and our understanding may be partly intuitive. We come to discern relationships among things in terms of whether they change together or separately we come to impute causes on the basis of phenomena co-occurring we come to classify as a result of independent variation. And well it should be, for our empirical knowledge is fundamentally of co-varying things. There is little doubt that the correlation coefficient in its many forms has become the workhorse of quantitative research and analysis. NOTE * I wrote this book for my students at the University of Hawaii who, as I was when I was an undergraduate, were puzzled by this strange animal called the correlation coefficient and the meaning of all those numbers called correlations. Statistical Versus Practical Significance ĬHAPTER 10. The Problem of External Effects: The Partial Correlation Interpreting The Correlation: Correlation SquaredĬHAPTER 7. Characteristics of The Correlation Coefficient Standard Scores and CorrelationĬHAPTER 4. Correlation Intuitively ConsideredĬHAPTER 3. There is an inverse correlation between the power a government has and the nation's foreign and domestic peace and the welfare of its people.ĬHAPTER 2. Rummel Honolulu: Department of Political Science "Is collective violence correlated with social pluralism?"Īpplication of Democide Collection Methods and Resulting EstimatesĬorrelation * R.J. "The Conflict Helix and the Probability of a Korean War," "Libertarianism, Violence Within States, and the Polarity Principle" "Libertarianism and International Violence" Methods and procedures for collecting democide dataĪpplication of Correlation/Factor Analysis
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