Question

Nursing students currently in a romantic relationship rated how important each of four different aspects of their relationship was to them. The article reporting the results included the following correlation matrix:

	Intimacy	Social Status	Self-Esteem	Companionship
Intimacy	1.0
Social Status	.03	1.0
Self-Esteem	.33*	.20	1.0
Companionship	.60**	.23*	.38*	1.0

Note. *p<.05 : **p<.01

1. The strongest correlation occurred between which two variables?

2. The weakest correlation occurred between which two variables?

c. How many associations between variables were statistically significant?

Answer 1

a.

To find the strongest correlation, we look at the largest value(apart from 1.0's on the diagonal) in the correlation matrix.

Clearly, such largest value is 0.60 which is the correlation between 'Intimacy' and 'Companionship'.

Thus, the strongest correlation occurred between 'Intimacy' and 'Companionship'. [ANSWER]

b.

To find the weakest correlation, we look at the smallest value in the correlation matrix.

Clearly, the smallest value is 0.03 which is the correlation coefficient between 'Intimacy' and 'Social Status'.

Thus, the weakest correlation occurred between 'Intimacy' and 'Social Status'. [ANSWER]

c.

To find the associations between variables which were statistically significant at 5% level of significance, we look at the values in the correlation matrix which have an '*' (asterisk) or '**' (double asterisk) since these are the correlations which have a p-value less than 0.05 and less than 0.01 respectively and thus are statistically significant at 5% level of significance. We have four such values given below along with the pairs of variables which are statistically significant at 5% level of significance:

Pair of variables	Correlation Coefficient
(Intimacy, Self Esteem)	0.33 (p-value < 0.05)
(Intimacy, Companionship)	0.60 (p-value < 0.01)
(Social Status, Companionship)	0.23 (p-value < 0.05)
(Self-Esteem, Companionship)	0.38 (p-value < 0.05)

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