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Crosstabs |
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Crosstabs |
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Crosstabs |
A Computer Program for Analyzing Political Data
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The sidebar on page 310 asks you to use the CROSSTABS program to assess how members of Congress rated in their support of two major interest groups, the AFL-CIO and the Chamber of Commerce. Unfortunately, data on the Chamber of Commerce were unavailable when CROSSTABS was updated for the 105th Congress (1997-98). So we substituted rating data on the Christian Coalition, which is discussed on the same page. between the strength of citizens' party identifications and when they decided how to vote for president. For this analysis, select the CONGRESS dataset, which contains about 40 variables describing the 435 members of the 105th Congress and their congressional districts.
The variables you want are listed under the "Member Traits" and "Job Ratings" menus. You should investigate whether a member's party affiliation (contained under "Member Traits") is related to his or her support of the AFL-CIO and the Christian Coalition (contained under "Job Ratings"). In causal language, party affiliation is the cause and support of the two interest groups is the effect. Expressed in another way, party is the independent variable and group support 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%. (Note that there is only one Independent in the House, Bernard Sanders of Vermont, so one cell in the third column will always equal 100%.)
According to this convention, you should place interest group support in the rows of your crosstab table, party affiliation in the columns, and choose "% by Cols" in the "Display" menu.
Go to Houghton Mifflin's CROSSTABS page to run the program.
