Disinfo Agent wrote:
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There are no absolute rules about which value should lead one to regard a correlation as real. Statistically, any nonzero correlation can become significant, provided you gather enough data to back it up.
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First sentence I agree with completely. Second I would qualify by saying that if the correlation increases as the sampled population increases you might be looking at a real causal link. If r=0.1 when n = 10, but increases to r = 0.9 at n = 100, I'm intererested. If r = 0.1 at n = 100 I'm not.
Part of the problem is that in my line of work an r of 0.5 would get me laughed out of the room.