In addition to what Gerry had already mentioned: of course, if the subsamples **B** and **C** were true random samples from the full sample, call it "population", meaning they are "representative" then the correlation-coefficients of the smaller samples are always estimators for that of the "population", and if you use two or more random subsamples the estimated population-coefficient is somehow an average. But well, as you state your problem, it looks very likely to me that **B** and **C** are not such random-samples but are taken using some criterion. If such a criterion is existent then one should determine whether it distorts the randomness of the subsamples: if you take,for instance, **B** from the left edge of the whole data-cloud in a scatterplot and **C** from the right edge then the best-fit-lines in that subsamples may have completely different slopes and variances around them. [update] Here I show examples where the subsamples were taken randomly. I generated correlated data of a population with *n= 2000*, normal distributed with *mean=0, stddev=1, correlation r~ 0.35* . I show the variation of the occuring correlations if random samples of *n=20, n=50, n=100* are drawn. For each sample-size I did *500* experiments and documented the frequencies of occuring correlations *r* in steps of about *0.1*. sample-n: 20 avg r: 0.37760 experiments: 500 pop-n : 2000 pop r: 0.35247 low r high r freq -------------------------------- -0.2023 -0.2023 1 -0.1807 -0.0948 8 -0.0878 0.0101 15 0.0205 0.1068 25 0.1112 0.2101 60 0.2123 0.3098 100 0.3113 0.4073 81 0.4109 0.5102 83 0.5109 0.6100 73 0.6107 0.7078 44 0.7122 0.7891 10 =================================== sample-n: 50 avg r: 0.36040 pop-n : 2000 pop r: 0.35247 low r high r freq -------------------------------- -0.1011 -0.1011 1 0.0175 0.1027 9 0.1098 0.2022 55 0.2056 0.3027 108 0.3043 0.4027 150 0.4047 0.5030 124 0.5045 0.6024 45 0.6099 0.6982 8 =================================== sample-n: 100 avg r: 0.35657 pop-n : 2000 pop r: 0.35247 low r high r freq ---------------------------------- 0.0504 0.0703 3 0.1139 0.2032 20 0.2054 0.3034 115 0.3055 0.4038 217 0.4047 0.4956 133 0.5046 0.5471 12 =================================== One can determine confidence-intervals for the correlations; that intervals narrow with increasing size of the samples. But this all is only useful if the different samples are really random and not taken by some systematic criterion.