The sidebar on page 551 suggests using CROSSTABS to assess
the relationship between respondents' self-placement on the liberal-conservative
continuum and their opinions on such "equality" issues as affirmative
action, women's roles, and equal rights. Go to Houghton Mifflin's
CROSSTABS
online page to run the program. (Ask your instructor for the appropriate
Username and Password to enter.) For this assignment, select the VOTERS
dataset on the 1996 presidential election
Self-placement on the liberal-conservative scale is listed under the
"Political Orientation" menu. The opinions questions can be found under
the "Issue Variables." Note that the VOTERS data uses the conventional,
one-dimensional liberal-conservative continuum, not the two-dimensional
set of four categories set forth in The Challenge of Democracy.
Ideological orientations are considered to be broader and more deeply-rooted
than opinions on issues. This time, therefore, ideological orientations
is the cause and opinions on "equality" issues are the effects.
Expressed in another way, political ideology is the independent
variable and the dependent variables are opinions on the issues.
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 opinions on issues
in the rows of your crosstab table, political ideology in the columns,
and choose "% by Cols" in the "Display" menu.