Vol. 25 No. 1 (2022)
Articles

SPURIOUS CORRELATIONS DUE TO INTERNAL PSYCHOLOGICAL BIASES WHEN MEASURING WITH SUBJECTIVE QUESTIONNAIRES

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  • Georgi Petkov
DOI: https://doi.org/10.7546/PsyRB.2022.25.01.06

Published 06/10/2022

Keywords

  • spurious correlation,
  • Likert scale,
  • questionnaires

How to Cite

Petkov, G. (2022). SPURIOUS CORRELATIONS DUE TO INTERNAL PSYCHOLOGICAL BIASES WHEN MEASURING WITH SUBJECTIVE QUESTIONNAIRES. Psychological Research (in the Balkans), 25(1). https://doi.org/10.7546/PsyRB.2022.25.01.06

Copyright (c) 2022 Psychological Research (in the Balkans)

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Abstract

Estimations of correlation could be overestimated due to sample errors, measurement noise, and biases, but also because of the nature of the correlational coefficient. In particular, it is a dispute whether the correlation reflects a single common factor (or few), or that it may emerge from a huge number of common factors, including contextual ones, so many, that it is impossible to control them all and therefore, it is needless to explore them at all. It is a widespread method in psychology to use various questionnaires, assuming that they measure some not directly observable psychological constructs. In this context, some temporal factors like mood, the current condition, and some more stable ones like cultural or personal specifics may produce spurious correlations. Two known psychological biases – ends effect and favorite number effect, when answering to questionnaires were simulated and it is demonstrated how they could produce moderate spurious correlation.

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