General Social Survey (2018): Statistics (SPSS Version)

REVISED: 2020

Exercises:

Exercise 1 - Levels of Measurement
Exercise 2 - Frequency Distributions
Exercise 3 - Graphs and Charts
Exercise 4 - Central Tendency and Dispersion
Exercise 5 - Measures of Skewness and Kurtosis
Exercise 6 - Hypothesis Testing - One-Sample t Test
Exercise 7 - Independent-Samples t Test
Exercise 8 - Paired-Samples t Test 
Exercise 9 - One-Way Analysis of Variance
Exercise 10 - Crosstabulation
Exercise 11 - Chi Square
Exercise 12 - Measures of Association
Exercise 13 - Spuriousness
Exercise 14 - Correlation
Exercise 15 - Bivariate Linear Regression
Exercise 16 - Multivariate Linear Regression
Exercise 17 - Dummy Variable Regression

Author: Ed Nelson
Department of Sociology M/S SS97
California State University, Fresno
Fresno, CA 93740

Email:  ednelson@csufresno.edu

© The Author, 2015, 2016, 2020; Last Modified February 3, 2020.

Text file - download and save in MS Word format.
Data File - download and save in SPSS system file format.

This is the first in a series of exercises for instructors teaching an introductory class in statistics.  This set uses SPSS.  There is a second set of exercises using PSPP and a third set using SDA. 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 exception. Exercises 15, 16, and 17 all focus on regression and are best used as a unit. Because the first 14 exercises are 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.

The exercises also serve to introduce students to SPSS which is a commonly used statistical package used in many classes.  A good reference on using SPSS is SPSS for Windows Version 26.0 A Basic Tutorial by Edward Nelson (Editor) and John Korey.  This tutorial is freely available by clicking on this link

The data set used in this exercise is GSS18A.sav which is a subset of the 2018 General Social Survey.  Some of the variables in the GSS have been recoded to make them easier to use and some new variables have been created. The data have been weighted according to the 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 any of the statistics nor do not 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.

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