EXAMPLES: RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN CHARACTERISTICS

EXAMPLE 1: You might wish to investigate whether creativity is related to certain personality characteristics - say if you suspected that, like famous unstable geniuses of the past, highly creative people are less stable than others. If you could measure stability and creativity, and plot them on a graph, you would expect people with higher creativity scores to have lower stability scores, and vice versa.

EXAMPLE 2: You might be interested in whether there is a relationship between a person's voting habits and their likelihood of supporting the legalisation of cannabis. You might expect that voting leftwing tends to be associated with supporting the legalisation of cannabis, and voting rightwing tends to be associated with wanting cannabis to remain illegal.

THINGS TO NOTE:

Correlation does not confirm causation: If you do find a statistically significant association between the variables, you cannot assume that one caused the other. In Example 1 above, you may hypothesise any of the following:

• Instability causes creativity
• Creativity causes instability
• Something else (adversity, eccentric parents?) causes both instability and creativity

Always plot the data so you can SEE any relationship: When you suspect that there is a relationship between two continuous variables it is important to plot the data on a graph. If there is a relationship it might be of various kinds. For example:

• Creativity increase as instability increases.
• Creativity decrease as instability increases.
• As instability increases, creativity at first increases, then plateaus, and then decreases - i.e. there could be a level of instability that is associated with maximum creativity, but beyond this, people are too unstable to be creative.
• Any number of other possible patterns of relationship or none.

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