Suppose a researcher wants to explain attitudes towards a respondent's city of residence in terms of duration of residence in the city

Question

The attitude is measured on an 11-point scale and the duration of residence is measured in terms of the number of years the respondent has lived in the city. In a pretest of 12 respondents, the calculated t value for the correlation coefficient based on the data given is 8.414. The critical value of t for a two-tailed test and ? = 0.05 is 2.228. r = .9361. What is the null hypothesis for this scenario? What do the results mean in terms of the null hypothesis and the correlation coefficient, r?

Answer 1

The null hypothesis of no relationship between X and Y is rejected. This along with the positive sign of r, indicates that attitude toward the city is positively related to the duration of residence in the city. Moreover, the high value of r indicates that this relationship is strong. If this were a large and representative sample, the implication would be that managers, city officials, and politicians wishing to reach people with a favorable attitude toward the city should target long-time residents of that city.