Answer to Question #202491 in Statistics and Probability for Leonie Patrocinio

Question

What does the ‘correlation coefficient’ that you calculated tell you about the direction and strength (magnitude) of the relationship between information and readiness? 

Answer 1

The correlation coefficient is characterized by:

• sign. If the correlation coefficient has a positive value, then two quantities correlate with each other (the increase of one quantity leads to an increase of the other quantity). If the sign is negative, then two quantities anticorrelate (an increase of one quantity leads to a decrease of the other quantity). This defines the direction of the scatter plot.
• value. If the absolute value of the correlation coefficient is close to zero, then 2 variables are independent. In opposite, if the absolute value is close to one, then the correlation is really strong and the points in the scatter plot will be grouped near one line. We can say that 2 variables are correlated or anticorrelated only when $r<-0.5$ or $r>0.5$ (absolute value is greater than 0.5).