pearson r correlation coefficient? (physical illness/disease)

MNM81

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Hey, guys and gals. First of all, I apologize for very likely sounding completely moronic; I'm sure that will be the case. I need some help, though, because I am struggling with a particular class in which statistics is a big part of the course. I am writing a research topic proposal that deals with the physiology of stress. Specifically, I aim to conduct quantitative research through an online survey of voluntary participants in which my sample will consist of two groups: those identifying as chronically stressed, and those who do not. My intent is to see if those reporting to be chronically stressed of an ongoing nature also report increased instances of physical illness/disease in comparison to the non-chronically stressed group to show a possible correlation that will warrant further research.

My questions are these:

1: If I am going to take into consideration various factors that would contribute to physical illness/disease (smoking, alcohol/drug dependence, certain diseases that run in a participant's family, etc), I would be dividing the sample into subgroups to get more accurate results from the data collected in relation to my objective, yes? So, this would be stratified random sampling?

2: In analyzing the data collected, would I use pearson r correlation coefficient in calculating the the data? See? So moronic, I know. I'm sorry!

Please help? :p
 
Hey, guys and gals. First of all, I apologize for very likely sounding completely moronic; I'm sure that will be the case. I need some help, though, because I am struggling with a particular class in which statistics is a big part of the course. I am writing a research topic proposal that deals with the physiology of stress. Specifically, I aim to conduct quantitative research through an online survey of voluntary participants in which my sample will consist of two groups: those identifying as chronically stressed, and those who do not. My intent is to see if those reporting to be chronically stressed of an ongoing nature also report increased instances of physical illness/disease in comparison to the non-chronically stressed group to show a possible correlation that will warrant further research.

My questions are these:

1: If I am going to take into consideration various factors that would contribute to physical illness/disease (smoking, alcohol/drug dependence, certain diseases that run in a participant's family, etc), I would be dividing the sample into subgroups to get more accurate results from the data collected in relation to my objective, yes? So, this would be stratified random sampling?

2: In analyzing the data collected, would I use pearson r correlation coefficient in calculating the the data? See? So moronic, I know. I'm sorry!

Please help? :p

Simply speaking, the correlation coefficient determines the extent to which two variables correlate. That is, does a high value of one variable correlate with a high value of the other (or a small value of the other). Do you have two measureable variable? That is, can you quantify (allocate a number to) the stress level for each participant? And also quantify the reported instances of illness/disease? For example, Participant 1 might be 81 on the stress scale and 38 on the "reported illness" scale. You will need these two values for each participant to calculate r.

If you are not quantifying the variables and are just coming up with a two way table:
eg with vertical headings "Stressed and "Not stressed" and horizontal headings "Illness" and "No illness" with the number of participants that fall into the 4 cells of the table, you might want to use a chi-squared test.
 
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