Research Question and Hypothesis

Hello Everyone, I think Joei nicely summarized the focus of one of our topic questions. Thank you, David for bringing thought-provoking subject into the group. And, thank you Brittany for guiding the group away from constructing narrow assumptions. When trying to establish whether a Family Income (X) causes a particular Choice of Study/Faculty (Y), we need to “control for” the effect of other causes of Y including (a) surrounding influences such as parent’s level of education, education like Joei stated but also (b) personal determination in other words, one’s independent interest. Understanding selection of faculty seems very interesting topic yet it involves multivariate that we could easily make a false inference. If we fail to control for the effects of Z, we are quite likely to misunderstand the relationship between Family Income and Choice of Study/Faculty because several uncontrolled-for Z (as we have identified) could be related to both X and Y, we are unable to conclude with complete sureness that Family Income indeed causes Choice of Study/Faculty and make the wrong inference.