required assignment: quantitative

The hard work is really starting to pay off! 

We conducted nearly 700 interviews this semester!

Now the task is to make good on all that hard work by producing some relevant findings.

To that end, each of you will produce a quantitative and a qualitative report, and that will then get combined into a final draft.   You will use the data to produce these reports based on your own interest and forethought.  You will be producing a final paper that incorporates some literature from the class, so you have an interest in choosing topics that relate to the articles you read throughout the semester. 

You need to produce and interpret 5 statistically significant tables for the quantitative paper.  You must have at least 4/5 of the quantitative paper interpreting significant tables that have music in the rows.  That means 4 out of the 5 tables you use must have music in the row.  You are not allowed to use race for more than one table (race always goes in the column).


You may do tables from either the crime/police questions or the hunger questions, as extra credit tables -- they cannot count toward the 5 minimum tables. 

 The 5 minimum tables must be on the topics of music, homelessness, and inequality (variables relating to these topics are placed in the rows).


You may not re-use the same column variable for multiple tables on the same topic.  That means if you use the column variable of gender and the row variable of "heavy metal music", then you can't use gender for another table using any of the music variables. If I wanted to do a second table on any of the music variables in the row of the table (e.g., "jazz music" variable),  I would need to use political party or race or something else besides gender in the column. 

 Let me give you another example.

If I produce a table on "homeless solution" and "political party" is in the column, then I can't re-use the "political party" variable again if I choose to present a second question on homelessness.  I would need to use a different column variable besides party, such as race or class or gender.

The point is that you may not re-use the same column variable for multiple tables on the same topic.

I will post and discuss further instructions to help you produce an excellent paper.

Quantitative data file:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/8xte8m2lpgxu3it/community_cleaned_for_class%20fall%202014.sav?dl=0

You need SPSS installed to open this SPSS file. Download the file, then it should open SPSS by just clicking the file. If it does not open SPSS by clicking the file, you may need to download the file, then open SPSS, then have SPSS open the file by using the file menu in SPSS.

SPSS has a free trial download you can use.   Almost all computers on campus have SPSS installed.  All computers in the social science computer lab have SPSS installed.

Also, the free alternative pspp may open the file as well.

This is the file for the graded research project.  In the next stage of the project, you need to use the above file to find and interpret at least 5 significant tables. 

Interpreting a table involves strategically choosing significant tables so you can tell a story, and for each table, interpreting: the P value, the 2-3 most important standardized residuals, the percents of the cells in the rows with the 2-3 most important cells, the overall findings (not using numbers), and a guess about why you found what you found with this table. 

As posted in the syllabus, this is a 5 page minimum paper and is due by Sunday Nov 9.

Students registered simultaneously in both classes must produce two completely unique reports.