Average: Group of answer choices A type of longitudinal study in which a given characteristic of some population is monitored over time. An example would be the series of Gallup Polls showing the electorate's preferences for political candidates over the course of a campaign, even though different samples were interviewed at each point. Any product of social beings or their behavior. A coincidental statistical correlation between two variables, shown to be caused by some third variable. For example, there is a positive relationship between the number of fire trucks responding to a fire and the amount of damage done: the more trucks, the more damage. The third variable is the size of the fire. They send lots of fire trucks to a large fire and a lot of damage is done because of the size of the fire. For a little fire, they just send a little fire truck, and not much damage is done because it's a small fire. Sending more fire trucks does not cause more damage. For a given size of fire, in fact, sending more trucks would reduce the amount of damage. An ambiguous term generally suggesting typical or normala central tendency. The mean, median, and