Correlations

Does caffeine cause cancer? Is autism caused by childhood immunizations? What is the relationship between eating sugary sweets at night and weight gain? It is often helpful to determine and explore relationships between variables. This is especially important in health care, a field dedicated to providing quality care for patients and improving health outcomes. Examining relationships between variables forms the basis for correlational statistics.

In this Discussion, you identify a health care or nursing practice problem that can be explored with correlational statistics and formulate a research question for exploring that problem. You also develop a null and alternate hypothesis, determine the variables related to the study, and predict relationships between the variables based on what you know of correlational statistics.

To prepare:

• Review      this week’s Learning Resources and the “Correlation” tutorial focusing on      the types of research questions that can be answered using a correlational      statistic.
• Brainstorm      a number of health care delivery or nursing practice problems that could      be explored using correlational statistics. Then, select one problem on      which to focus for this Discussion.
• Formulate      a research question to address the problem and that would lead you to      employ correlational statistics.
• Develop      a null hypothesis and alternate hypotheses.
• Ask      yourself: What is the expected direction of the relationship?

By tomorrow Tuesday 10/03/17, 5 pm, write a minimum of 550 words essay in APA format. Use the two references below from the required media and reading list.  Include the level one headings as numbered below:  

          

Post a cohesive response that addresses the following:

1) Identify your selected problem in the first line of your posting and post your research question.

2) Post a null hypothesis and alternate hypotheses for your research question and identify the dependent and independent variables that would be associated with the research study.

3) Provide your prediction for the expected relationship (positive or negative) between the variables. Why do you think that sort of relationship will exist? What other factors might affect the outcome?

Required Media

Walden University. (n.d.). Correlations. Retrieved August 1, 2011, from http://streaming.waldenu.edu/hdp/researchtutorials/educ8106_player/educ8106_correlations.html

Required Readings

Gray, J.R., Grove, S.K., & Sutherland, S. (2017). Burns and Grove’s the practice of nursing research: Appraisal, synthesis, and generation of evidence (8th ed.). St. Louis, MO: Saunders Elsevier.

• Chapter      23, “Using Statistics to Examine Relationships”

Chapter 23 explains how to use statistics to examine relationships between groups using correlational analyses, scatter diagrams, Spearman rank-order correlation coefficient, and Kendall’s tau.

Statistics and Data Analysis for Nursing Research

• Chapter      4, “Bivariate Description: Crosstabulation, Risk Indexes, and Correlation”      (pp. 59–61 and 68–78)

This chapter describes components of bivariate descriptive statistics, including crosstabulation, risk indexes, and correlation. The chapter also discusses the concepts of absolute risk, relative risk, odds ratio, and correlation matrices.

• Chapter      9, “Correlation and Simple Regression” (pp. 197–209)

This portion of Chapter 9 continues the discussion of inferential statistics and explores correlation and simple linear regression.