Re: Association between two nominal variables?

Posted by Scott Czepiel on Sep 20, 2006; 8:27pm
URL: http://spssx-discussion.165.s1.nabble.com/Association-between-two-nominal-variables-tp1071026p1071035.html

Does anyone else experience pangs of nausea upon seeing this
"interpretation" of the correlation coefficient?  General rules of thumb
like this are highly dangerous:  what constitutes a weak or strong
correlation is entirely dependent on context.  For example, if you found a
0.7 correlation between number of planes that take off and the number that
subsequently land, would you really be happy to conclude that you'd found a
strong relationship?  Likewise, studies of manufacturing tolerance or mtbf
very often deal with situations where a 0.98 is too weak and a product is
scrapped or a factory floor is shut down.  Please be highly skeptical of
such reductionistic attempts of making statistics too easy!


>.0 to .2 weak or no relationship
> >.2 to .4 weak relationship
> >.4 to .6 moderate relationship
> >.6 to .8 strong relationship
> >.8 to 1.0 very strong relationship
> >(Salkind, Neil "Statistics for People who think they hate statistics,
> 2000
> >pg. 96)
>