General Social Survey (2018): Statistics Using SDA (Survey Documentation and Analysis)

REVISED: 2020

Exercises:

  • Exercise 1 - Levels of Measurement
  • Exercise 2 - Measures of Central Tendency and Dispersion 
  • Exercise 3 - Measures of Skewness and Kurtosis
  • Exercise 4 - Graphs and Charts
  • Exercise 5 - Comparing Means and Testing Hypotheses
  • Exercise 6 - Hypothesis Testing – One-Way Analysis of Variance
  • Exercise 7 - Crosstabulation
  • Exercies 8 - Hypothesis Testing – Chi Square
  • Exercise 9 - Measures of Association
  • Exercise 10 - Spuriousness
  • Exercise 11 - Correlation
  • Exercise 12 - Comparison of Correlations
  • Exercise 13 - Bivariate Linear Regression
  • Exercise 14 - Multiple Linear Regression
  • Exercise 15 - Dummy Variable Regression
  • Appendix - Notes on Using SDA

Author: Ed Nelson
Department of Sociology M/S SS97
California State University, Fresno
Fresno, CA 93740
Email: ednelson@csufresno.edu

© The Author, 2020; Last Modified February 24, 2020. 

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This is the third in a series of exercises developed for instructors teaching an introductory class in statistics. This set uses SDA (Survey Documentation and Analysis). There is another set of exercises using SPSS and a second set using PSPP. All three sets of exercises are on the Social Science Research and Instructional Council’s website

The exercises were written so each exercise is independent of the others and any one exercise can be used even if the other exercises are not used. There is one exceptions. Exercises 13, 14, and 15 all focus on regression and are best used as a unit. Because the exercises were written to stand alone there is often duplication across the exercises. If you use several of the exercises together you may want to edit them to remove this duplication or to add material of your own.

These instructional exercises were originally written for SPSS. However, some colleges, including many community colleges, do not have a site license for SPSS. The cost of SPSS is often prohibitive, so I rewrote the exercises for SDA which was developed by the Survey Methods Program at UC Berkeley. SDA is freely available to anyone with internet access.

The data set used in these exercises is the 2018 General Social Survey. The data have been weighted according to instructions from the National Opinion Research Center. 

These exercises are not a comprehensive treatment of these statistical tools. They do not discuss how to compute most of the statistics nor do they discuss all the assumptions of these statistics. You may want to add some of this information to the exercises.

You have permission to use these exercises and to revise them to fit your needs. I would appreciate receiving a copy of your revision so I can see how the exercises are being used. If you find any errors in the exercise, please email me and I will correct them. I would also like to hear from you about your experiences using the exercises. Please contact me for more information.