The 3 C's

• Correlation


  •The association/relationship between two variables (co-variables)•Such relationships are plotted on a scattergram where each axis represents one of the variables investigated.
• CORRELATION COEFFICIENT

  •Correlations/associations may be analysed using statistical tests. (We will look at this later in the topic).•These tests produce a number between -1 and +1 known as the correlation coefficient.  •This value tells us the strength and direction of the relationship between the 2 variables.
• •A value of +1 represents a perfect positive correlation, and a value of —1, a perfect negative correlation.•The closer the coefficient is to +1 or —1, the stronger the relationship between the co-variables is; the closer to zero, the weaker the relationship is.•However, it should be noted that coefficients that appear to indicate weak correlations can still be statistically significant — it depends on the size of the data set.
• Descriptive statistics refers to things like graphs, tables and summary statistics (such as measures of central tendency and measures of dispersion). These are used to identify trends and analyse sets of data.
• Inferential statistics refers to the use of statistical tests which tell psychologists whether the differences or relationships they have found are statistically significant or not. This helps decide which hypothesis to accept and which to reject. A correlation coefficient is calculated using a statistical test and, as such, is an inferential statistic.
• Content Analysis


  –Interviews–Newspaper articles–Letters–Online forums–Feedback forms–transcripts
• Content Analysis 


  •Is a type of observational research in which people are studied indirectly via the communications they have produced.•
• •Coding is the initial stage of content analysis.•Some data sets to be analysed may be extremely large and so there is a need to categorise this information into meaningful units.•This may involve simply counting up the number of times a particular word or phrase appears in the text to produce a form of quantitative data.
• •Content analysis may also involve generating qualitative data, e.g. thematic analysis. Themes may only emerge once data has been coded.••A theme refers to any idea that is recurrent which keeps 'cropping up' as part of the communication being studied. These are likely to be more descriptive.
• }Inter-rater reliability – the two psychologists could carry out the content analysis of the films separately (they watch the clips and create the categories separately, agree on them and then do the analysis separately) and compare their answers looking for agreement (correlation of +.8 = reliable).
• }Test-retest reliability – the psychologist could conduct the content analysis (including watching the clips and creating the categories) and then recode them (create the categories again etc.) at a later date and compare the two sets of data looking for agreement (correlation of +.8 = reliable).•