Steve Tippins Ph.D.Helping doctoral students get their dissertation accepted, succeed in their careers, & change the world | Academic Career Advisor | Dissertation Chair & Founder, Beyond PhD Coaching | 35 + years of experience.

This Correlation Mistake Gets Dissertations Rejected

18 Apr 2026 · 1 min

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In this brief monologue, Steve Tippins, Ph.D., explains why statistical significance does not automatically imply a meaningful relationship and warns against spurious correlations in academic work. He clarifies that statistical significance merely indicates that an observed effect is unlikely to be due to random chance, but it does not guarantee practical relevance. Using the illustrative example that an American League team winning the World Series does not cause stock prices to rise, he demonstrates the classic "correlation does not imply causation" fallacy and the danger of presenting such misleading links in dissertations. The talk concludes with a call‑to‑action, inviting viewers to comment "help" to receive a link to a free dissertation‑help community.

Chapters

If something is statistically significant, it's less likely to have occurred randomly. It means, oh, there's something there. It's not, hey, if a baseball team from the American League wins the World Series, then stock prices go up. There's no real reason to believe anything like that is correlated or is significant. But perhaps we can have something called spurious correlation, and sometimes people report things based upon, oh, the numbers work, but is it actually meaningful? So expanding on that, correlation means things move in a similar pattern. It doesn't mean causation. So the example I used, if an American League team wins the World Series, there's no reason to expect that would have any implication or causation with stock prices. So correlation, but not causation. Drop the word help in the comments and I'll send you the link for my free dissertation help community.