Exercise 6.2: Association and Temporal Order

Write a hypothesis about politics that shows what you believe to be association, but not causation. Explain why you believe the variables are not causally related. As a way to get started, think about the level of education and amount of income (for countries, American states, or individual persons) as possible competing independent variables.



Describe a situation in which it might be difficult to set the temporal order of the two variables in a hypothesis. For example, could the following hypothesis from Exercise 6.1 be stated with the independent and dependent variables reversed? "The greater the proportion of a state's tax revenue generated by tourism, the more that state will spend on the environment."