For example, I just computed the Pearson r between statophobia (the
first-day amount of self-reported fear of the course expressed by students
who have taken stats with me the last several years) and the height of the
students' ideal mate. Although "significant" at .003, the r was rather
small, .13. The sample size was moderately large, 489. More fun is to see
how it is that the students interpret this correlation -- why does
statophobia covary with the height of ideal mate?
Karl W.
-----Original Message-----
This is not a fantastically useful concept because it depends on the
sample size. For small N very few correlations are statistically
significant; for very large N most of them are. As the sample size is
usually unrelated to the population, "statistical significance" is not an
attribute of the population.
-Robert Dawson
.
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