Question

Suppose income and personal health are correlated at 35. What can you say about cause and effect?

Answer 1

Here the correlation coefficient is given by 0.35, by this value we can only say about there is a relation ship between income and personal health. But this does not necessarily imply any cause and effect relationship between them. Here from the value 0.35, we can simply say that there is a positive relation between income and personal health,that means that as one variable changes so does the other. But we can not say the low income causes the low health condition or higher the income cause the higher health condition. similarly nothing can be said about the effect relation by simply knowing the correlation between the variables.