Statistics, PSPP version. Data from 2018 General Social Survey

REVISED: 2020

Exercises:

  • Exercise 1 Levels of Measurement
  • Exercise 2 Frequency Distributions
  • Exercise 3 Measures of Central Tendency and Dispersion
  • Exercise 4 Measures of Skewness and Kurtosis
  • Exercise 5 Hypothesis Testing - One-Sample t Test
  • Exercise 6 Hypothesis Testing - Independent-Samples t Test
  • Exercise 7 Hypothesis Testing – Paired-Samples t Test 
  • Exercise 8 Hypothesis Testing – One-Way Analysis of Variance
  • Exercise 9 Crosstabulation
  • Exercise 10 Chi Square
  • Exercise 11 Measures of Association
  • Exercise 12 Spuriousness
  • Exercise 13 Correlation
  • Exercise 14 Bivariate Linear Regression
  • Exercise 15 Multiple Linear Regression
  • Exercise 16 Dummy Variable Regression

Author:   Ed Nelson
Department of Sociology M/S SS97
California State University, Fresno
Fresno, CA 93740
Email:  
ednelson@csufresno.edu

© The Author, 2020; Last Modified February 2, 2020.

Text file - download and save in MS Word format.
Data File - download and save in SPSS system file format. (PSPP can read this format.)

This is the second in a series of exercises for instructors teaching an introductory class in statistics. This set uses PSPP. There is another set of exercises using SPSS and a third set using SDA. The exercises were written so each exercise is independent of the others and any one exercise can be used even if the other exercises are not used. There is one exception. Exercises 14, 15, and 16 all focus on regression and are best used as a unit. Because the exercises are written to stand alone there is often duplication across the exercises. If you use several of the exercises together you may want to edit them to remove this duplication or to add material of your own.

These instructional exercises were originally written for SPSS.  However, some colleges, including many community colleges, do not have a site license for SPSS.  The cost of SPSS is often prohibitive, so I rewrote the exercises to run in PSPP, which is free statistical software sponsored by the Free Software Foundation.  There is a tutorial on PSPP that is freely available by clicking on this link. There is also a tutorial on using SPSS (version 26) that is available by clicking on this link  .

The data set used in these exercises is GSS18A.sav which is a subset of the 2018 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. The data have been weighted according to the instructions from the National Opinion Research Center. 

These exercises are not a comprehensive treatment of these statistical tools.  They do not discuss how to compute any of the statistics nor do not discuss all the assumptions of these statistics.  You may want to add some of this information to the exercises.

You have permission to use these exercises and to revise them to fit your needs. I would appreciate receiving a copy of your revision so I can see how the exercises are being used.  If you find any errors in the exercise, please email me and I will correct them.  I would also like to hear from you about your experiences using the exercises.  Please contact me for more information at ednelson@csufresno.edu.

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