What should i do with this data?

Question

Ok so i stink at statistics. I am doing a research project which is attempting to relate certain crimes in a neighborhood to a specific charcteristic of that neighborhood.

so for example I have the number burglaries in all the neighborhoods of the city along with the median income of those same neighborhoods.

What I would like to do is somehow show how burglaries are related to the median income level of the neighborhood.

How do i do this? I have a copy of spss that I can use for data analysis but have never used, so any help there would be great also. i have never taken a stats course either so i am kind of ignorant when it comes to using them.

any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

I also stink at statistics, but I know that what you want to calculate is a correlation coefficient. It tells you the degree to which one variable is correlated to another. it lies between +1 for complete positive correlation, through 0 for zero correlation (no relation between the variables) to -1 for complete negative correlation.

Spss should be able to do it easily.

This might explain it better than I can:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation