Methodological problems and fundamental errors in the use of a correlation analysis on the example of political sociology

The article seeks to study the statistical dependencies in sociological research. The vast majority of sociologists studying the cause and effect relations, offer, on the basis of their data, an interpretation of only linear relations and linear models. But the problem arises not only when sociologists, interpreting the linear dependencies, ignore, often failing to understand the essence of the issue, a large number of non-linear relations having a simple form (errors of type 1). In the last 20 to 25 years the psychology has been mainly concerned with the study of not such simple processes that might fit into linear models. So, the sociologists take a path (knowingly or not so) in which weak linear relations (few strong ones are detected, if at all) with reference to the hypothesis that the correlation coefficient is equal to zero (the saving stars of SPSS) started being presented as “meaningful” and latently understood as fairly strong correlations that are scientifically interesting for interpreting the cause and effect relations...