Question: Graduate student Angela Holiday (2007) conducted a study examining perceptions of combat veterans suffering from mental illness. Participants read a description of a person, either a man or a woman, who had recently returned from combat in Iraq and who was suffering from depression. Participants rated the situation (combat in Iraq) with respect to how traumatic they believed it was; they also rated the combat veterans on a range of variables, including scales that assessed how masculine and how feminine they perceived the person to be. Among other analyses, Holiday examined the relation between the perception of the situation as being traumatic and the perception of the veteran as being masculine or feminine. When the person was male, the perception of the situation as traumatic was strongly positively correlated with the perception of the man as feminine but was only weakly positively correlated with the perception of the man as masculine. What would you expect when the person was female? The accompanying table presents some of the data for the perception of the situation as traumatic (on a scale of 1-10, with 10 being the most traumatic) and the perception of the woman as feminine (on a scale of 1-10, with 10 being the most feminine)
a. Draw a scatterplot for these data. Does the scatterplot suggest that it is appropriate to calculate a Pearson correlation coefficient? Explain.
b. Calculate the Pearson correlation coefficient.
c. State what the Pearson correlation coefficient tells us about the relation between these two variables.
d. Explain why the pattern of pairs of deviation scores enables us to understand the relation between the two variables. (That is, consider whether pairs of deviations tend to have the same sign or opposite signs.)