The Phi Coefficient

The Phi Coefficient

Relationship between Two Statistics

As one studies the statistics it comes to ones attention that there is a fairly strong relationship between the availability of Kilojoules per day and the life expectancy of the people of that particular country. We choose the availability of KJ/person/day and Life expectancy to try to examine if there is a correlation between the two and if so what type of relationship. We used the over under method (Figure 1.1) to examine the two statistics and using a mathematical equation (Figure 1.2) which was "=(a x d) - (b x c) divided by the square root of A x B x C x D" we calculate a number between -1 (which would be a negative relationship) and +1 (which is a positive relationship). We got 0.61 which is a moderate to fairly strong positive relationship between KJ/person/day and Life expectancy.

Of the 170 countries that had both of the statistics, 104 of those countries had over 10000 KJ/day and a life expectancy of over 60 years. This can be explained perhaps because most of the countries that had a life expectancy of over 60 years had the food available to them. Most of the people in those high life expectancy countries have the money to purchase food in order to survive and they are not dying because of malnutrition often found in the poorer countries were there is no food for the people and people are dieing at a much younger age thus lowering the life expectancy of the country. Also it can be explained by the input output theory, in which the more input we put into our bodies in terms of healthy foods the longer our output of life will be. So it can be argued that there is a correlation between the two.

Of the 170 countries that we used, 57 of them had a life expectancy of lower then 60 years of age, and of the 57 countries with a life expectancy of 60 years of age and lower 37 of them, or roughly two-thirds, had lower then 10000 KJ/day. Which again states the point indirectly that the relationship between the two is that the more food people eat, generally the higher the life expectancy is.

There is a couple of anomalies or exceptions of the rule in the relationship

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