The Effects of Violations of Assumptions Upon Certain Tests of the Product Moment Correlation Coefficient.

This study investigated the effects of non-normality of the marginal distributions of the bivariate surface upon the sampling distribution of certain tests of significance of differences for the product moment correlation coefficient. The effects of non-normality were found to be rather substantial and to be dependent upon: 1) the degree of correlaton in the population, 2) the types and extent of non-normality introduced, and 3) in some situations, the size of the samples drawn. A relationship between the variance of the sampling distributions of the test statistics and other effects of marginal non-normality was also observed. (Author)