Is road out of poverty down the aisle? - chicagotribune.com
This article highlights what is wrong when researchers overplay their results, or, worse yet, when politicians or the media get hold of results and start pontificating. Reports of associations or relationships (correlations) are not reports of cause. But often they are reported as such. In this article, for example, the association between poverty and not being married was interpreted as: If we can get these people to marry, they will no longer be in poverty. There was a relationship, that is all. We can go on all day and try to explain it, but that would only be subjective surmising. We'd have to conduct further research to see what is going on.
I like the author's explanation: "People tend not to marry if they are financially unstable. They tend to break up due to poor relationship skills. Work on both these factors, and we might just see our poverty rate move in the right direction." But we'd have to research it.
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