Key Issues

In this chapter, we address eight questions:

1. Why is description a valuable goal in its own right?
2. Why do we need to use scientific methods to accomplish the goal of description?
3. Why is it difficult to infer causality from correlational designs?
4. Which correlational design should you use?
5. How can data from a correlational design be summarized?
6. What do positive and negative correlation coefficients mean?
7. What common statistical tests can be used on correlational data?
8. When analyzing data from a correlational design, how do you interpret the results of a test of statistical significance?

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