Following the Line

Hi all, and welcome to the final episode of material for our statistics course! In this episode, we tackle the last of our parametric inferential tests: linear regression. Regression is about fitting a line to our data, which is a lot like doing algebra... but don't let that scare you away! When we use SPSS, the process is quite simple: the software takes our data, figures out the line that minimizes the error (or distance between the fitted line and our actual values), and then tells us just how good that line is in terms of how much it explains in our dependent variable (aka, the coefficient of determination, or R-squared). The last bits of this episode will describe how this is done in SPSS, what remains for us with ...