The sidebar on page 607 suggests using CROSSTABS to determine how the
public would reduce government spending. 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.
In 1996, voters were asked whether they favored increasing or decreasing
government spending for about a dozen purposes, from defense to welfare.
Two questions immediately present themselves: (1) for which purposes
does the public want the government to spend less than it has
been spending, and (2) are there any systematic differences in spending
priorities when responses are analyzed by party identification, ideological
orientation, or social grouping?
In this analysis, you will be trying to explain opinions on
government spending (your dependent variables) by political or social
factors (your independent variables or "causes").
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 spending in the rows of your crosstab table, and the political or social
variables in the columns, and choose "% by Cols" in the "Display" menu.