Business Statistics Made Easy in SAS

Relating Continuous or Ordinal Data: Correlation & Covariance

Introduction

In this book, when dealing with continuous or ordinal data we almost exclusively deal with the simplest of all patterns of association, namely, linear association. The speed versus errors example given above is an example of this. Linear association happens in one of two ways:

• Positive linearity implies that when one variable is high the other also tends to be high, and similarly when the first is medium or low so is the second.
• Negative linearity implies that when the first variable is high, the second variable tends to be low and vice versa. A classic example of negative relationships is that between satisfaction and employee turnover: when employee satisfaction ...