Regression

Overview
Regression is similar to correlation in that it is trying to fit data values along
a best-fit straight line, but regression can be used to predict the value of one
variable given the value of another variable. In other words, regression lets
you predict what your dependent variable value will be from one or more
independent variables.

Hypotheses
H0: The proportion of variance the independent variables account for in the
dependent variable is 0. (no relationship)
H1: The proportion of variance the independent variables account for in the
dependent variable is not 0. (there is a relationship)

Equation
Trust me, you don’t want to do this one by hand. Use a statistical analysis
program.

Warning!
• There are several different kinds of regression. This handout just
covers linear regression.
• Unstandardized coefficients cannot be compared to each other. Use the
standardized or Beta coefficients to compare the effects of the
predictor variables.
• The following example is actually multiple regression because I used
two independent variables. I also left out the scatterplots that are
sometimes used to check the relationships between the variables
before the analysis. See the SPSS help section for links to more
thorough resources.

SPSS
• Click Analyze > Regression > Linear. . .
• Select the dependent variable and one or more independent variables.
In this example, the dependent variable is the grade students received
on a research assignment, and the independent variables are the time
in minutes they spent searching for articles and the number of articles
they found.

UT Southwestern Medical Center Library—October 2007

R square tells us that the independent variables explain 40.6% of the
variance of the dependent variable.

The F statistic tests to see if the null hypothesis is 0, i.e., the R square
statistic is not significant, and there is no relationship between the
independent and dependent variables. We can see that the null hypothesis
was not supported. Our results are significant at .001, so we know that our
independent variables are accounting for a significant proportion of the
variance of our dependent variable.

The Coefficients table gives us information about the effects of each of the
individual predictor variables. The unstandardized coefficients show us the
increase in the value of the dependent variable for each unit increase in the
independent variable. For each minute of searching, the student’s grade will
increase by .212 points. We cannot compare the relative influences of the

UT Southwestern Medical Center Library—October 2007

independent variables with the unstandardized coefficients, however. We
must use the Beta coefficients because they are standardized instead of
being on multiple scales like the unstandardized coefficients. From the Beta
coefficients, we can see that the time spent searching has about six times
the effect on grade than the number of results found.

The Coefficients table also gives us a significance test for each of the
independent variables’ influence on the dependent variable. We can see that
the time spent searching accounts for a significant amount of variance in the
grade. The number of results returned does not account for a significant
amount of the variance in the grade. Thus, when we look at the results in
the ANOVA table, we know that the time spent searching is accounting for
most of the model’s effect on the dependent variable.

SPSS Help
For additional examples of how to perform regression analysis in SPSS,
please see the following sites.
• http://www.american.edu/cte/docs_pdfs/training/SPSS_Regressionand
Correlation.pdf : An explanation of how to perform and interpret
regression and correlation analyses from American University.
• http://www.indstate.edu/cirt/research/statsoftware/spss13_regression
.pdf : Thorough explanations with plenty of screenshots of how to
perform linear and other kinds of regression from Indiana State
University.
• http://www.visualstatistics.net/SPSS%20workbook/multiple_regressio
n.htm : A thorough but brief explanation from Cruise Scientific of how
to create and read scatterplots and perform multiple regression
analyses.

UT Southwestern Medical Center Library—October 2007