Topic 9: C – Pearson’s Correlation Coefficient

Video (3:35)

The following video illustrates calculating Pearson’s Correlation coefficient which is useful in Case QQ where we wish to investigate the relationship between two quantitative variables. The relationship should be reasonably linear in order for Pearson’s correlation coefficient to be meaningful. We will use ANALYZE – CORRELATE – BIVARIATE in SPSS. The following files are associated with this video.

• All Available Transcripts – SPSS Tutorials

• DATASET USED:
  • PULSE_STEP3.SAV

• SPSS OUTPUT CREATED:
  • Topic9CPearsonsCorrelationCoefficient.SPV
• Menus and Steps Used:
  • Double-click on the SPSS dataset (STEP3) to open SPSS with that data loaded
  • ANALYZE – CORRELATE – BIVARIATE
    • Drag quantitative variables into the Variables list
    • In OPTIONS – decide whether or not to include the means and standard deviations
    • Note the other selections – later we will discuss Spearman’s Rank Correlation which is available here
    • We can decide whether or not to flag statistically significant correlations (we will discuss statistical significance later in the course)
    • Decide whether to display statistics or plots or both
    • Click OK
  • Save SPSS output by going to the output and File – Save or by closing SPSS and following the prompts

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This document is linked from our main SPSS page under Software.