The sidebar on page 261 asks you to use the CROSSTABS program to
assess the relationship between citizens' party identifications
and their ideological orientations. Go to Houghton Mifflin's CROSSTABS
online page to run the program. (Ask your instructor for the
appropriate Username and Password to enter.) As in the assignment
for Chapter 7, select the VOTERS dataset, which contains data from
1,714 respondents on about 50 variables related to voting in the
1996 presidential election
Both variables you want are listed under the "Political Orientation"
menu. According to most research on political socialization, most
citizens acquire their party identifications earlier than their
ideological orientations. Therefore, you will be trying to explain
differences in respondents' political ideology by their party identification.
In causal language, party identification is the cause and
forms of political ideology is the effect. Expressed in another
way, party identification is the independent variable and
political ideology is the dependent variable.
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 political ideology
variable in the rows of your crosstab table, party identification
in the columns, and choose "% by Cols" in the "Display" menu.