Research Tips
Correlations
Most people have heard the term “correlation” before, but some people don’t understand the precise meaning of this word in a statistical sense. When researchers talk about two things being correlated, it means that the value of one tends to vary along with the value of the other. Correlations can be positive or negative and strong or weak.
- If two variables are positively correlated, it means that if the value for one variable is high, the value for the other tends to be high too, and if one value is low, the other also tends to be low.
- If two variables are negatively correlated, it means that a high value of one tends to be associated with a low value of the other.
- The more strongly two variables are correlated (either positively or negatively), the better the value of one variable predicts the value of the other.