Correlation Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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In political science, two variables are said to correlate when they tend to vary together. More precisely, correlation can be positive if the variables move in the same direction (they both increase or decrease at the same time), or negative if they move in opposite directions (when one variable increases, the other decreases).

In statistics, correlation is more specifically defined as a measure of the strength, or consistency, of the linear relationship between two variables in a population. Graphically, this statistic indicates how well the scatterplot obtained by representing the observations on a Cartesian plane with the two variables as dimensions fits along a straight line. Correlation is most commonly measured—or estimated, when only a sample is available—with the Pearson product-moment coefficient (ρ or r in statistical notation, respectively, for populations and samples), a standardized indicator whose value ranges between -1 (perfect negative correlation) and 1 (perfect positive correlation), and where 0 denotes the absence of correlation.

The correlation coefficient is an inadequate statistic when the relationship analyzed is believed to be nonlinear or when the variables of interest are nominal or ordinal. In these cases, alternative measures of association such as the chi-square, Spearman’s ρ, or Kendall’s τ might be more suitable.

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