Law - Research Methods in CJ

Entering Data into the Data Editor

For most of the sessions in this book, you will start by accessing data already stored on a disk. For small datasets or class assignments, though, it will often make sense simply to type in the data yourself. For this session, you will transfer the data displayed below into the Data Editor.

In the first session, our goal is simple: to create a small data file, and then use the software to construct two graphs using the data. This is typical of the tasks you will perform throughout the book.

The coach of a high school swim team runs a practice for 10 swimmers and records their times (in seconds) on a piece of paper. Each swimmer is practicing the 50-meter freestyle event, and the boys on the team assert that they did better than the girls. The coach wants to analyze these results to see what the facts are. He codes gender with as F (female) for the girls and M (male) for the boys.

The first step in entering the data into the Data Editor is to define three variables: Swimmer, Gender, and Time. Creating variable requires us to name it, specify the type of data (qualitative, quantitative, number of decimal places, etc.) and assign labels to the variable and data values if we wish.