SOAN 2120 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Scatter Plot, List Of Statistical Packages, Grounded Theory

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

Document Summary

Learning objectives: understand what it means when two variables are correlated, understand the concept of causality in the social sciences, to be able to identify the key differences between qualitative and quantitative research methods. The correlation coefficient is a good summary measure of the direction and strength of a linear relationship. It ranges from -1 (perfect negative linear relationship) to +1 (perfect positive linear relationship); 0 means no linear relationship. It does not tell us the slope of the line (tells us how close those dots are to the line) Outliers: unusual patterns, one dot one observation can change the correlation coefficient significantly. What to do with outliers: if part of the data but unusual, if a coding error, remove the observation from the data. How do we know which variable causes the other? that occurs second is the effect variable. Sometimes identifying a causal order can be problematic.