galton: Galton's Family Data on Human Stature.

Description Usage Format Details References Examples

Description

It is a reproduction of the data set used by Galton in 1885 to study the correlation between the parent's height and their children. Galton introduced the concept of correlation indeed few years later in 1888. He also suggested the use of the regression line, and was the first to describe the so-called common phenomenon of regression toward the mean, which he first observed in his experiments on the size of the seeds of successive generations of peas.

Usage

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Format

A data frame with 928 observations on the following 2 variables.

parent

The parents' average height

child

The child's height

Details

Regression analysis is the statistical method most often used in political science research. The reason is that most scholars are interested in identifying "causal" effects from non-experimental data. Regression is the method for doing this. The term "Regresssion" (1889) Sir Francis Galton investigated the relationship between body size of fathers and sons. Thereby he "invented" regression analysis. He estimated: S_s = 85.7 + 0.56S_F This means that the size of the son regresses towards the mean. Therefore, he named his method regression.

References

Francis Galton (1886) Regression Towards Mediocrity in Hereditary Stature. The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, Vol. 15, pp. 246–263.

James A. Hanley (2004) ‘Transmuting’ women into men: Galton's family data on human stature. The American Statistician, 58(3), 237-243.

Examples

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data(galton)

## Not run: plot(galton)

SciencePo documentation built on May 2, 2019, 5:53 p.m.