Which statistical method is used to examine relationships between variables?

Regression analysis is used to examine relationships between variables by modeling the relationship between a dependent variable and one or more independent variables. It helps in understanding how changes in the independent variables affect the dependent variable. For example, in business research, regression analysis can be utilized to predict sales based on various factors such as marketing spend, economic conditions, or consumer behavior, allowing decision-makers to understand the strength and nature of the relationships between these variables.

While correlation analysis also examines relationships between variables, it specifically focuses on measuring the strength and direction of a linear relationship between two variables without implying causation. Descriptive statistics summarize and describe the characteristics of a dataset but do not analyze relationships between variables. Factor analysis, on the other hand, is more focused on identifying underlying relationships among variables based on patterns of correlations, rather than explicitly modeling the direct relationship between variables like regression does.