Name of Assignment: Research In Psychology Subject: Psychology Facilitator/Teacher: Dr. Azman
In Psychology 100, we do a discussion board each week, which is basically just a few paragraphs on a topic that relates to or expands upon what we are reading about in the textbook that week. One week, we were learning about how psychologists research and experiment, and Dr. Azman wanted us to understand how data can be misleading. So, she told us to find an example where two statistics happened to correlate, even though they were clearly unrelated. I wrote about how mozzarella cheese consumption per capita and the number of civic engineering degrees awarded had a strong correlation from 2000 until 2009.
This assignment addresses Information skills because part of Information skills is learning to effectively research, and this assignment helped me learn about something that can lead to incorrect assumptions when researching.
I'm proud of the fact that I was able to find a very different, obviously unrelated example of correlation without causation, and that I was still able to come up with some sort of explanation for how they could be related.
I improved my Information skills during this assignment because I now know to look out for correlation without causation when I am researching in order to avoid incorrect conclusions.
The most difficult part of this assignment was finding two statistics that were unrelated, but also correlated at some point. I ended up doing an insane amount of very strange internet searches in order to find the statistics that I did.
If I started over with this assignment, I would do it earlier. Because everyone had to find a different example, most of the answers that showed up when you searched up "correlation without causation" were used early and I had to spend a very long time finding an unique example.
In past assignments, I have noticed the way news outlets sometimes use unrelated statistics that happen to correlate to draw misleading conclusions, but I didn't fully understand it until I did this assignment.
I can apply this to future assignments where I have to do a lot of research because I now know what to look out for and that I have to be careful about making assumptions based on unrelated statistics.