In: Statistics and Probability
A college newspaper interviews a psychologist about student ratings of the teaching of faculty members. The psychologist says, “The evidence indicates that the correlation between the research productivity and teaching rating of faculty members is close to zero.” The paper reports this as “Professor McDaniel said that good researchers tend to be poor teachers, and vice versa.” Explain why he paper’s report is wrong. Write a statement in plain language (don’t use the word “correlation”) to explain the psychologist’s meaning.
Each of the following statements contains a blunder. Explain in each case what is wrong. (a) “There is a high correlation between the gender of American workers and their income.” (b) “We found a high correlation (r= 1.09) between students’ ratings of faculty teaching and ratings made by other faculty members.” (c) “The correlation between planting rate and yield of corn was found to be r = 0.23 bushel.”
As per the psychologist the evidence indicate that there is not relation between research productivity and teacher rating that is it implies that the research productivity and the teaching rating do not follow a specific trend, they are not at all dependent on each other. The change in one does affect the other in any way, but according to the newspaper claim they do affect each other in negative manner that is higher the value of one lower wouldbe the value of other, which infact isn't true at all.
a) Gender being a categorical variable we can't justify the correlation between them that is we can't say higher the value of gener higher is their income, because there exist no such thing called as higher gender, so this statement isn't true.
b)The value of correlation is given to be 1.09 which is not possible because correlation lies between -1 to +1 and this value exceeds 1 so this isn't possible.
c) correlation does not have a unit.
In this case correlation has a unit given by bushel, but correlation should be unitless, hence this is the problem with this part of the question.