Author Question: Carlos, the president of a fraternity on campus, randomly sampled 500 students, asked them if they ... (Read 549 times)

fbq8i · **on:** Jun 22, 2018

Carlos, the president of a fraternity on campus, randomly sampled 500 students, asked them if they belonged to a fraternity or sorority, and asked them about their current GPA.

He discovered that the GPAs of those people in fraternities and sororities were higher than those of people who were not involved in the Greek system. Gleefully, he presented his findings to the dean, saying that being involved in a fraternity or sorority leads to higher grades. What rule of research methods is Carlos breaking?

a. Correlation does not prove causation.
b. College students are not representative of the whole sample of people in the world.
c. His sample size of 500 is too small to make such a generalization.
d. Correlational data do not provide any practical information on a topic.

Question 2

There is a moderately strong correlation between the number of bars in a town and the number of churches in a town. As it turns out, this correlation is due to the correlation of both numbers of bars and number of churches with town population.

This illustrates which of the following? Correlations are

a. unreliable.
b. no guarantee of causation.
c. variable.
d. indicative of causation.