Correlation And Causation: What Extent Is It Misleading?

Correlation and Causation
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Correlation and Causation
There are several reasons why correlation does not mean causation. Correlation simply presents the linear association between two variables that does equal causation. If one variable rises or falls the other one also follows a similar pattern, the association can either be positive or negative (Campbell & Stanley, 2015).
For example, two variables can be correlated, but it does not have any causal relationship. If we are to perform a survey to understand the correlation between individual reading ability versus shoe size within a particular country, the outcome will be that people with larger shoe sizes will the associated with good reading skills. However, we cannot conclude that having larger shoes automatically guarantees them good reading skills (Faye, 2017). Reading skills is caused by other factors like age. Age in this case age is an important factor and is known as confounding variable factor. Confounding variab...