Question: As this chapter is being written, March Madness, the final championship series in college basketball in the United States, is in full swing. The national sports media and news media enjoy covering the games and including human interest stories about the young men and women who compete at this elite level. Some of these athletes also compete at the highest level in academics. While the stereotype of the dumb jock might be strong and ever-present, a fair amount of research shows that athletes maintain decent grades and competitive graduation rates when compared to nonathletes. Let's play with some data to explore the relation between GPA and participation in athletics. Data are presented here for a hypothetical team, including the GPA for each athlete and the average number of minutes played per game.
a. Create a scatterplot of these data and describe your impression of the relation between these variables based on the scatterplot.
b. Compute the Pearson correlation coefficient for these data.
c. Explain why the correlation coefficient you just computed is a descriptive statistic, not an inferential statistic. What would you need to do to make this an inferential statistic?