When determining correlations, sociologists sometimes fall victim to spurious relationships. What is a spurious relationship, and how did the Coleman Report demonstrate a spurious relationship between school resources and test scores?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

A spurious relationship is an apparent relationship between two variables that turns out to be false. When two factors seem to move in the same direction but both are themselves caused by something else (i.e., a third factor), sociologists refer to the apparent relationship between the first two factors as a spurious relationship.
The Coleman Report demonstrated that a relationship between school resources and student test scores was largely a spurious relationship. While it looked like one caused the other, in fact other factors—namely, family background and the racial composition of schools—were behind the relationship. If you wanted to reduce inequality in student testing outcomes, equalizing funding would not do much. Instead, one would have to begin to better racially integrate U.S. public schools so that the school peers of African American students more closely resembled those that a typical white student encountered in schools.