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Crosstabs |
Citizen Quiz
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Crosstabs |
A Computer Program for Analyzing Political Data
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The sidebar on page 225 asks you to use the CROSSTABS program to assess the effects of demographic variables, such as gender, race, and religion on various measures of political participation. Go to Houghton Mifflin's CROSSTABS online page to run the program. (Ask your instructor for the appropriate Username and Password to enter.) Select the VOTERS dataset, which contains data from 1,714 respondents on about 50 variables related to voting in the 1996 presidential electionThe variables you want are listed under the "Political Orientation" and "Personal Traits" menus. You will be trying to explain differences in respondents' political participation by their social characteristics. In causal language, social characteristics are the causes and forms of political participation are the effects. Expressed in another way, the social characteristics are the independent variables and forms of participation are the dependent variables.
The convention for constructing analytical tables in social research is to place dependent variables along the rows of a table, independent variables along the columns, and then compute percentages according to the column totals so that the total percentages in each column sum to 100%.
According to this convention, you should place the individual "Political Orientation" variables in the rows of your crosstab table, the individual "Personal Traits" variables in the columns, and choose "% by Cols" in the "Display" menu.
