Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Department of Urban Studies and Planning

11.220 Quantitative Reasoning and Statistical Methods for Planning

SPSS

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SPSS> Correlation

1. To find the correlation between two variables go to Analyze->Correlate->Bivariate...

2. Select "incws" and "educ_yr." Press "Options."

3. Check "Mean and standard deviations" and "Exclude cases pairwise." This means that if there are any missing values in either or both of the variables the record will be excluded from calculation of this correlation coefficient. To exclude cases listwise means to exclude cases that have missing values for any of the variables in any of the analyses.

4. View the result. With a value range of -1 to 1, a correlation coefficient of .376 indicates a weak positive correlation between income and years of education. The significance test tells us how unlikely it is that this value would occur if there was no relationship between income and education.

Created by Myounggu Kang on January 25, 2004. Edited by Rhonda Ryznar on January 20, 2005.