Can Any Psychology Students Lend A Hand Please?

silaslang

Im sorry If im posting this in the wrong place but i didnt know were else to post it

Anyone here studying Psychology? I desperatley need help concerning scattergrams and correlations.
[EMAIL="walter_kovak@hotmail.co.uk"][/EMAIL]

Its concerning this scattergram and pearson r correlation. I am writing up the results for an assignment and Im struggling with the statistical element of psychology so far.


Any help would be greatly appreciated.

anewman

In the image you link to...

You have a negative correlation.

Basically more exercise = less stress, and more stress = less exercise. However as this is a correlation it would be *wrong* to say one *causes* the other. It's merely a relationship.

The correlation is significant to an alpha level of p<0.05 although you have a weak correlation coefficient of r=-.150 which suggests that although the relationship between the variables is statistically significant (p<0.05) meaning you're at least 95% certain the relationship is not due to chance, one does not predict the other particularly (i.e. if you know someone's exercise you can't predict their stress) well which could suggest other factors are involved - or it may highlight design problems in the way the measurements have been taken. Issues like self-report measures and so on.

With the scattergram itself if this is done in excel if you click on the circles there's a way to put a tick somewhere and it will put in a regression line for you to show the pattern of the relationship.

I would write something about the outlier who has stress at almost 50 and exercise at about 20. Why do they not seem to follow the usual pattern? Can anything explain this? Why do they have almost twice the amount of the mean level of stress in the whole sample? Of course all the usual stuff don't write people's names down and stuff. Hope this helps somewhat.

silaslang

Thank you very much , I had wrote something along similiar lines but not as precise as yours. I appreciate the advice very much. Thanks have been added and I owe you a favour If you ever need one:)