IS 296A-4 Seminar on Research Methods:

Introduction to Quantitative Methods

Basic Information

Syllabus

Lecture Slides

Assignments

SPSS Tutorial

Assignment 2: Choosing the Appropriate Statistical Test / Working with Statistical Software

Due on Monday, April 10th at the beginning of class. Bring only ONE copy.

General Preparation

For this Assignment, you may use any general purpose statistical software package (i.e., SPSS, STATA, SAS, R, S-Plus). If you plan to use a software package that I have not listed here, please let me know in advance.

You will be working with the 1993 GSS subset dataset that I have been using in class. The file (gss93 subset.sav) can be found in the main SPSS directory if you are using SPSS in the I-School computer lab, or downloaded from here.

If you choose to use a statistical package other than SPSS, you will need to convert the file into the appropriate file format. If you do not already know how to do this, tell me soon so that I can help you convert the file.

The Assignment

The purpose of the assignment is to make sure that you can use a statistical package and then conduct univariate and bivariate statistics with the appropriate kinds of variables. I am not asking you to include your univariate statistics in the document that you turn in. However, you will need to use univariate statistics (such as descriptives and frequencies) in order to find the appropriate variables for each of the tests in the assignment.

For each of the following analyses, you should a) Paste the output table into your assignment, and b) Interpret the results in no more than 50 words.

  1. Conduct a correlation analysis on any two appropriate variables.
  2. Conduct a t-test analysis on any two appropriate variables.
  3. Conduct a chi-square analysis on any two appropriate variables.
  4. Conduct an ANOVA on any two appropriate variables.

Format and Due Date

Please put all of your results and answers into one document (If its more than one page, please staple your pages together). You only need to bring ONE copy of your assignment to class.

The assignment is due on Monday, April 10th at the beginning of class.