What’s the definition of a dependent variable?
A dependent variable is what changes as a result of the independent variable manipulation in experiments. It’s what you’re interested in measuring, and it “depends” on your independent variable.
In statistics, dependent variables are also called:
- Response variables (they respond to a change in another variable)
- Outcome variables (they represent the outcome you want to measure)
- Left-hand-side variables (they appear on the left-hand side of a regression equation)