Date:         Wed, 9 Oct 2002 16:37:42 -0600
Reply-To:     Judy Brown <Judy.Brown@state.co.us>
Sender:       "SPSSX(r) Discussion" <SPSSX-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
From:         Judy Brown <Judy.Brown@state.co.us>
Subject:      Adjectives Commonly Associated with Correlation Coeficients
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII

Hi.  Do you know of any articles or books that provide  guidelines for
appropriate adjectives to assign to correlation results.   I used to
have an article that gave some guidelines, but I can no longer find it
and I'd like to have a source for such terms.
   For example, something like...
.9 and better might be described as excellent
.8 as good
.6 -. 7 as moderate
.5 as low
.4 and below as poor

    I have received a draft report from a contractor in which
interrater reliability  of r=.96 was described as 'high' as was a r=.8.
Then they went on to describe both of these results as 'very good'
interrater reliability.     Later in the same report, the phrase 'highly
correlated' was used to describe r=.53 and r=.48 for a concurrent
validity comparison of the summary score of two assessment tools.  I
would like to ask our contractor for more consistency in the adjectives
they are using to describe the correlation coeficients within their
draft report, but I'd like to have a reference document on which to base
this recommendation.
       Do you know of any references that I might utilize for this
purpose?

Thank you, Judy Brown (303/866-7443)