Spss political analysts

POLS 3000 Computer Assignment #1 (the first graded one) TASK 1: Calculating basic descriptive statistics and descriptive comparisons

New procedure:

FREQUENCIES --SPSS Manual, Section 4.1

Step 1: As you did in the test run, open up a clean version of the ANES2016.sav data set Step 2: As in the trial run, weight your data by PW2016_FULL. STEP 3: Run a frequency for the two feeling thermometers V16 (Clinton), V17 (Trump)

• You may want to suppress the frequency distribution table (see FORMAT=NOTABLE, p. 53). There are a possible 101 categories (0-100) and you really don’t need to see them all. On the other hand, it’s interesting to see what percentage gave each a dismal rating of ‘0’, and the small percentage who were neutral (50).

• Using the FREQUENCIES subcommand STATISTICS, produce the following statistic (see STATISTICS=, p. 53-55) for each of the two variables

MEDIAN MEAN RANGE STDDEV

Step 4: Interpret each of those values. Just discuss the standard deviation as a weighted (i.e., extreme cases count more heavily) MAD. Step 5: Compare the four statistics across each of the two variables. What do they tell you about the distribution of feelings towards the two major-party candidates?

TASK 2: Comparing subgroups descriptively New procedure:

MEANS --SPSS Manual, Section 4.2 The MEANS procedure (pp. 59-62) makes it easy for us to calculate statistics for a variable or variables for different subgroups within our sample. Step 1: Use that procedure to generate the median, mean, range, standard deviation (STDDEV), and Number of Cases (COUNT) for both of your feeling thermometer variables for both men and separately women. The gender variable, V1, was accidentally omitted from your codebook but is part of the datafile. V1 Gender 1. male 2. female Step 2: You should realize by now that the RANGE is not very useful as we will always have respondents who give a ‘0’ evaluation as well as a ‘100’. So just compare men and women on the two measures of central tendency and the standard deviation for both V16 and V17. Describe in detail what you have found.

TASK 3:

Transfer all relevant information to a WORD document with your relevant output, commentary and answers to questions. Do not copy over the full Frequency Distribution (0 – 100) if you produced it. I suggest also making a copy (in SPSS or export to WORD) of all of your instructions (syntax or generated by the GUI) and adding them to your output so that your TA can check why you might have the wrong answers (of course, you won’t, right?).