II.

Pearson Correlation
- The Pearson correlation allows us to establish the strength of relationships of continuous variables.
- One of the easiest ways to visualize the relationship between two variables is to plot the values of
one variable against the values of the other.
=> Example : fictitious data on short-term memory and language proficiency
Here arc the scores for the first five students:

-A scatterplot/ scattergram
+A graph in which the the vertical axis (y axis) indicates the dependent variables and the horizontal
axis ( x axis) reprents the independent variables.
+ A point is plotted for each individual at the intersection of their scores.

positive
correlation
 negative correlation

- Sometime, the line does not touch all the points but that it does reflect the general direction of the
relationship

-It is
also possible that no relationship will be apparent from the scatterplot

- The actual strength of the correlation is reflected in these scatterplots. The tighter the points
cluster around the straight line, the stronger the relationship between the two variables
- Regression line : a technical term for the imaginary straight line around which all the points
cluster. The angle of the regression line is called the slope.
- The amount of variation of the point from the regression line and the tightness of the clustering of
the points to the line determine the magnitude, the strength of the correlation coefficient

1. Computing the Correlation Coefficient

-We can equate the values or the two variables by converting them to z scores.
-z score is a way to standardize scores across tests and is computed as:

-The closer each student’s z score is on the two ratings (whether positive or
negative), the greater the strength of the relationship between the two tests.
=>This is the value of the correlation coefficient for these data, the value of an
absolutely perfect correlation.
- The z score formula for the Pearson correlation:

(Notice that this formula uses N- l in the denominator while the previous example
used N. N- 1 is an adjustment for sample data.)
r: correlation coefficient, always be somewhere between -1 and 0 or 0 and + l. The
closer the r is to ± l, the stronger the relationship between the variables.