Note to
the instructor: The data set used in this exercise is sisssp1.por which consists
of a subset of the 1996 General Social Survey. (Some of the variables in the
GSS have been recoded to make them easier to use and some new variables have
been created.) This exercise uses RECODE and CROSSTABS in SPSS to explore the
relationships among variables. In CROSSTABS, students are asked to use percentages,
chi square, and an appropriate measure of association. A good reference on using
SPSS is SPSS for Windows Version 6: A Basic Tutorial by Nan Chico, John
Korey, Edward Nelson, Elizabeth Nelson, Richard Shaffer, and Jim Ross. To order
this book, call McGraw-Hill at 1-800-338-3987. The ISBN is 0-07-913673-7 . There
is also a revision of this book for version 7.5, SPSS for Windows Version
7.5: A Basic Tutorial. The ISBN is 0-07-366023-X. You have permission to
use this exercise and to revise it to fit your needs. Please send a copy of
any revision to the authors.Authors:
Ed Nelson and Elizabeth Nelson
Department of SociologyCalifornia State University, Fresno
Fresno, CA 93740Phone: 209-278-2275
(Ed) and 209-278-2234 (Elizabeth)Email:
ednelson@csufresno.edu and/or
elizn@csufresno.eduPlease contact
the authors for additional information.There are many
social issues that you can explore using the General Social Survey. In these
exercises, we are going to focus on abortion, confidence in institutions,
tolerance for people holding unpopular ideas, and the types of social problems
that people are willing to spend money on.
- Seven variables
focus on people's feelings about abortion: ABANY, ABDEFECT, ABHLTH, ABNOMORE,
ABPOOR, ABRAPE, ABSINGLE. Each question asks respondents if they think a
woman ought to be able to obtain a legal abortion under varying circumstances.
Choose one of these variables and use it as your dependent variable. Now
choose one of the following variables as your independent variable: gender
(SEX), class (CLASS or INCOME91), RACE, AGE, political party (PARTYID),
and religion (RELIG or RELITEN or ATTEND or PRAY). Get the crosstabulation
of these two variables along with the appropriate percentages and chi square
and an appropriate measure of association (Gamma or Cramer's V). Write a
short paragraph interpreting the relationship using the percentages and
the other statistics to help you.- Several variables
measure the amount of confidence the respondent has in the major institutions
of our society. These include the military, big business, organized religion,
education, the Executive Branch of the Federal Government, Congress, the
press, and others. These variables all start with CON and there are fourteen
of them.
- Run a frequency
distribution to see which institutions respondents have the most confidence
in and which they have the least confidence in. Be sure to use the appropriate
percentages to make these comparisons. (Do you want the percents or the
valid percents? Why?) Write a brief paragraph summarizing your results.- Some people
have more confidence in these institutions than others. Let's use political
party preference (PARTYID) to divide respondents into Democrats, independents,
and Republicans. You will have to recode PARTYID into three groups to
do this. Combine strong and not strong Democrats into one group, combine
strong and not strong Republicans into a second group and combine independents
(near Democrat, near Republican, and independents) into a third group.
Since there aren't many in the other category, let's recode "other" as
a missing value (9) so it will be removed from the table.- Now choose
one of the social institutions that you think Democrats, Republicans and
independents will have different levels of confidence in. Decide which
is the independent and dependent variable and get the crosstabulation.
Be sure to ask for the appropriate percents, chi square, and measure of
association. Write a paragraph indicating which group has the most confidence
in this institution and which group has the least confidence. Use the
percents, chi square, and measure of association to help you explain the
relationship of these two variables.- Three sets
of questions ask respondents whether they are tolerant of people who hold
deviant viewpoints. One set of questions asks respondents if they would
allow five different types of people to teach in a college or university
(COLATH, COLCOM, COLHOMO, COLMIL, COLRAC). Another set asks respondents
if a book written by these five different types of people should be allowed
in the public library (LIBATH, LIBCOM, LIBHOMO, LIBMIL, LIBRAC). Still another
set asks respondents if these people should be allowed to make a public
speech in their community (SPKATH, SPKCOM, SPKHOMO, SPKMIL, SPKRAC). The
five groups of people are those who are against churches and religion, communists,
homosexuals, people who advocate doing away with elections and letting the
military run the country, and those who claim Blacks are inferior.
These variables
have been combined into five other variables that measure tolerance for
atheists, communists, homosexuals, militarists, and racists. Each variable
is the sum of the three variables from the larger set of variables. For
example, tolerance for racists is the sum of COLRAC, LIBRAC, and SPKRAC.
Since each variable is coded 1 and 2, where 1 is the tolerant response and
2 is the intolerant response, the new variable (called TOLRAC) will vary
from 3 to 6. The value 3 means that the respondent would be tolerant of
racists in all three scenarios, while the value 6 means that the respondent
would not be tolerant of racists in any of the three scenarios. The values
4 and 5 would be intermediate values. The value 9 would be the missing value
and indicate that the respondent did not answer at least one of the three
questions.Get the frequency
distributions for TOLATH, TOLCOM, TOLHOMO, TOLMIL, and TOLRAC to see if
there is more tolerance for some of the groups than for others. Write a
short paragraph explaining the results using the appropriate percents. (Be
careful to decide whether you want the percents or the valid percents.)Which groups
of people would you expect to be more tolerant of homosexuals: men or women,
Democrats or Republicans or independents, those living in the South or the
Northeast or the Midwest or the West, working/lower class or middle/upper
class? Choose one of these groupings and write a hypothesis that indicates
your expectations. Write a short paragraph indicating why you think one
group will be more tolerant of homosexuals than another.Now find the
variable in the list of variables that you want to use as the independent
variable to test your hypothesis. Your dependent variable will be TOLHOMO.
Get the crosstabulation to test your hypothesis. Be sure to get the appropriate
percents, chi square, and measure of association. Write a short paragraph
using the results to indicate whether the data support your hypothesis.Chose one other
tolerance variable (TOLATH, TOLCOM, TOLMIL, and TOLRAC) and repeat the analysis
described above.- Americans
decide what types of social problems to spend money on. The General Social
Survey includes a series of questions that ask respondents whether we are
spending too much, too little, or about the right amount of money on a series
of problems. These problems include foreign aid, the military, big cities,
crime, drugs, education, the environment, welfare, health, mass transportation,
parks and recreation, the conditions of blacks, highways and bridges, social
security, and space exploration.
The General
Social Survey includes two versions of most of these questions. All the
spending variables start with NAT. The alternative version of each question
ends with Y. For example, the questions on welfare are NATFARE and NATFAREY.
NATFARE asks whether respondents think we are spending too much, too little,
or about the right amount of money on "welfare." NATFAREY substitutes "assistance
to the poor" for "welfare" in the question. A few questions have only one
version of the question (i.e., no version Y). For this exercise, we will
be using the original version of each question (i.e., the one that does
not end in Y).Using the data,
find out which problems respondents are the most likely to think we are
spending too much money on and which problems respondents think we are spending
too little on. Write a brief paragraph summarizing your findings.Republicans,
Democrats, and independents often differ in terms of the problems they think
we should be spending money on. Crosstabulate political party preference
(PARTYID) and the spending variables to find out which problems Democrats
think we should be spending more on, which problems Republicans think are
more important, and which problems independents want to spend more money
on. You will need to recode PARTYID into a smaller number of categories.
See question 2 above for one way of recoding PARTYID. Use the appropriate
percents, chi square, and measure of association to help you in your analysis.
Write a short paragraph describing your results.Class is another
variable that often divides people on spending priorities. Use the variable
CLASS to see if different classes have different spending priorities. You
will have to recode CLASS. Do this by combining lower and working class
into one category and middle and upper class into another category. Write
a paragraph summarizing your results.Find one variable
where there are significant class and party differences on spending priorities.
Which is more important--class or party? Think about how you are going to
decide this. You will have to run a three-variable table to see the effect
of one of these variables holding the other constant. For example, crosstab
one of the NAT variables with class holding party constant. Then crosstab
the same NAT variable with party holding class constant. Were there larger
differences for class or for party when the other variable was held constant?
Or were the differences about the same? Be sure to use the appropriate percents,
chi square, and measure of association to help you. Write a paragraph or
two describing your findings.- We already
described the two different versions of the NAT variables. Why do you think
the researchers did this? Different forms of the same questions often produce
different results. For example, studies have found that people are more
likely to say they would not allow something than they are to say they would
forbid the same activity. The NAT... and the NAT...Y variables allow us
to study the effect of question wording on what respondents tell us.
Choose several
pairs of NAT variables (e.g., NATFARE and NATFAREY, NATCRIME and NATCRIMY).
Do a frequency distribution for both variables in the pair and see if the
wording of the question makes any difference in the way respondents answered
the questions. Keep looking at pairs of NAT variables until you find one
pair where the question wording did make a difference and one pair where
it didn't make a difference. Write a short paragraph summarizing your results.It's possible
that question wording makes more of a difference for some respondents than
for others. Choose the pair of NAT variables where question wording did
make a difference. Check to see if the wording of the questions made more
of a difference for respondents with less education than for those with
more education. How would you do this? You could choose DEGREE (highest
degree) or EDUC (years of school completed) as your measure of education.
If you choose EDUC, recode it into three or four categories. We have already
recoded it in one possible way (EDUC1). Then crosstab the NAT variables
with your measure of education. Now compare the way respondents answered
the NAT questions for each level of education. Try to construct a graph
showing the differences. One way to do this would be to construct two line
graphs. Each line graph could show the percent who felt we should be spending
less money along the vertical axis and level of education along the horizontal
axis. You would need two graphs--one for each of the NAT questions. These
two line graphs could be placed on the same graph. Write a brief paragraph
summarizing your results.- Other variables
in the data set focus on women's issues and on issues of race. Most of the
variables that begin with FE deal with women's issues and variables that
start with RAC focus on race. Decide which of these issues you want to study
and then look carefully at the appropriate variables for that issue in the
codebook. Choose one variable that you would like to study. This will be
your dependent variable. Now choose two independent variables that you think
will be related to your dependent variable. For each variable, write a hypothesis
that clearly states the relationship you expect to find between your independent
and dependent variable. Indicate why you think this hypothesis will be true.
Get the crosstabulation that you need to test this hypothesis. Be sure to
ask for the appropriate percents, chi square, and measure of association.
Write a short paper that includes the hypothesis, the rationale for the
hypothesis, the crosstabulation to test the hypothesis, and your interpretation
of the table. Be sure to indicate whether the data support the hypothesis.
Last Modified 15 August 1998
