California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Latest update: Aapril 13, 1999
Faculty on the Site.

Jeanne at jcurran@csudh.edu
Subject line: stex05: not applicable and dispersion
First message line: Your name and class.
Second message line: Name of each member of your collaborative group. Body of message: xxxxxxx

Source materials for the following questions will be found in Adventures in Criminal Justice ResearchDowdall, Babbie, and Halley, Capter 6. Mark exact pages when you find them.

Try to answer in 25 words or so. Make each answer integral, so that I can read it without reference to the exercise or the question itself.

1. Review: Variables and Labels

   What are value labels and why do we use them?

   They are brief names to identify the different values that the variable can take on. For example, if the variable is gender, then the values in can take on in most studies are male and female. Suppose we coded the answer male as "1' and the answer female as "2". Then male is the value label for a coded answer of "1" and female is the value label for a coded answer of "2".

2. Review: What are variable labels? And how are they different from value labels?

   Variable labels are the names we give to the variables themselves. For example, gender would be the variable label. But gender might appear in our SPSS tables as var001. We use the label to make the SPSS tables easier to read as we work with them.

3. What are we measuring when we speak of "measures of central tendency" and "dispersion"?

   We are measuring the values around which the respondents cluster when we look at the frequency distribution. i.e., The mode tells us the category that most respondents chose for their answer on a survey. The median tells us the value for which half of the respondents were above that value, and half below that value. The mean, with which we are most familiar, tells us the "average" value that variable had in the sample.

4. What is the mean age of the respondents in the GSS survey in the new text?

   45.96

5. Interpret the mean of 45.96 for the GSS survey in the DBH text.

   The average age of the sample respondent was close to 46 years. This would suggest that the survey does not give us adequate information if what we want is a picture of young people's attitudes to these issues. On the other hand, the survey might provide a a good picture of the views on these issues held by the parents of the young people in whom we are interested.

   The standard deviation for the sample was approximately 18 years, suggesting that 68% of the sample is between 38 and 64 years of age.

   ---

   ---