Correlations: Description or Inference?

This paper was solicited and the review and publication in The Journal managed by the Editor. Research is often conducted in agricultural education with the purpose of explaining and/or predicting phenomena. This research is frequently labeled associational, relational, correlational, a m facto or causal-comparative depending primarily upon which author one studied when learning about research. The purpose of explaining is most often addressed by what is known as the correlation question: “Do two variables vary together? ” The second, a prediction question, examines: “How well can 'Y ' be predicted from knowledge of 'X'? " As might be expected, the statistic used to answer the correlation question is a correlation and regression analysis is used t