Article Writing Homework Help

Your assignment is to prepare and submit a paper on correlaton. There is a positive correlation between self-esteem and depression, and in this case it is 0.64. Tom interprets this to mean that low levels of self-esteem lead to high levels of depression. Tom misinterprets these data.

Correlation calculates or somehow defines the level of relationship between two variables, the dependent and independent variables (Healey, 2012). One can denote these variables as x and y variables, respectively. In the case of Tom’s data the level of self-esteem can be denoted as the x variable and the level of depression can be denoted as the y variable. If there is a relationship between these variables, then x influences y or in other words y depends on x. The value of correlation ranges from -1 passing 0 to +1. The -1 value is considered a negative perfect correlation. The +1 value is considered a positive perfect correlation.

The existence of positive correlation between the two variables means that for every increase of x, there is a corresponding increase of y. On the other hand, the negative correlation indicates that for every increase of x there is decrease of y and vice versa. There is an inverse relationship.

In the case of Tom’s data, the existence of inverse relationship is not remarkable due to a 0.64 correlation between the levels of self-esteem and the levels of depression. This correlation could mean that for every increase of the level of self-esteem there is also a corresponding increase of the level of depression or conversely, the increase of the levels of depression results to a significant increase of the levels of self-esteem too.

Reference

Healey, J. (2012). The essentials of statistics: A tool for social research (3rd ed.). Belmont, CA: Cengage Learning.