--- Richard Goldstein <[email protected]> wrote:
> I have no idea what you mean by "very low" when referring to the
> value of r-squared
I always tell my students that their choice of romantic partner is
pre-determined by their school, and the social background of their
parents. My students immediately rebel against that. Next, I show a
regression explaining education of partner by own education and
education of the father, which has a r-squared of about .4 and tell
them that this model does not explain about 60% of the variation, and
ask them wether they are happy with this model. The answer is usually
no, and then I explain to them they are being inconsistent...
In other words a very low r-squared is very likely to be the state of
the (social) world, and not a problem with your model.
-- Maarten
BTW if I had to classify an R-squared of .4, than I would classify it
as very high. The correlation between characteristics of partners is
usually exceptionally strong, most other correlations in the social
sciences are much much weaker. In many other cases I would not be
surprised when seeing an R-squared of only 1%.
-----------------------------------------
Maarten L. Buis
Department of Social Research Methodology
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Boelelaan 1081
1081 HV Amsterdam
The Netherlands
visiting address:
Buitenveldertselaan 3 (Metropolitan), room Z434
+31 20 5986715
http://home.fsw.vu.nl/m.buis/
-----------------------------------------
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