13.1 The correlation coefficient r

As we begin this section we note that the type of data we will be working with has changed. Perhaps unnoticed, all the data we have been using is for a single variable. It may be from two samples, but it is still a univariate variable. The type of data described in the examples above and for any model of cause and effect is bivariate data — "bi" for two variables. In reality, statisticians use multivariate data, meaning many variables.

For our work we can classify data into three broad categories, time series data, cross-section data, and panel data. We met the first two very early on. Time series data measures a single unit of observation; say a person, or a company or a country, as time passes. What are measured will be at least two characteristics, say the person’s income, the quantity of a particular good they buy and the price they paid. This would be three pieces of information in one time period, say 1985. If we followed that person across time we would have those same pieces of information for 1985,1986, 1987, etc. This would constitute a times series data set. If we did this for 10 years we would have 30 pieces of information concerning this person’s consumption habits of this good for the past decade and we would know their income and the price they paid.

A second type of data set is for cross-section data. Here the variation is not across time for a single unit of observation, but across units of observation during one point in time. For a particular period of time we would gather the price paid, amount purchased, and income of many individual people.

A third type data set is panel data. Here a panel of units of observation is followed across time. If we take our example from above we might follow 500 people, the unit of observation, through time, ten years, and observe their income, price paid and quantity of the good purchased. If we had 500 people and data for ten years for price, income and quantity purchased we would have 15,000 pieces of information. These types of data sets are very expensive to construct and maintain. They do, however, provide a tremendous amount of information that can be used to answer very important questions. As an example, what is the effect on the labor force participation rate of women as their family of origin, mother and father, age? Or are there differential effects on health outcomes depending upon the age at which a person started smoking? Only panel data can give answers to these and related questions because we must follow multiple people across time. The work we do here however will not be fully appropriate for data sets such as these.

Beginning with a set of data with two independent variables we ask the question: are these related? One way to visually answer this question is to create a scatter plot of the data. We could not do that before when we were doing descriptive statistics because those data were univariate. Now we have bivariate data so we can plot in two dimensions. Three dimensions are possible on a flat piece of paper, but become very hard to fully conceptualize. Of course, more than three dimensions cannot be graphed although the relationships can be measured mathematically.