Applied Regression Models in the Social Sciences

A major concern in the social sciences is understanding and explaining the relationship between two variables. We showed in Chapter 5 how to address this issue using tabular presentations. In this chapter we show how to address the issue statistically via regression and correlation. We first cover the two concepts of regression and correlation. We then turn to the issue of statistical inference and ways of evaluating the statistical significance of our results. Since most social science research is undertaken using sample data, we need to determine whether the regression and correlation coefficients we calculate using the sample data are statistically significant in the larger population from which the sample data were drawn.