Chapter 12 Introductory Remarks

Chapter 12 introductory remarks

If I were in charge of designing your text book I would have put chapter 12, before chapter 7. I would do this, because in my opinion, correlational research is simpler to understand than are experimental ,quasi-experimental and factorial designs.

In correlational approaches the aims of the investigator are to to characterize the relationship between variables including the direction, strength, and significance of the relationship. You may have heard the expression that “correlation does not equal causation.” Since correlational designs cannot be used to show cause and effect relationships they are often done in the early stages of studying a psychological phenomenon and the results of correlational designs are then used to develop appropriate experiments or quasi-experiments.