Title: Tutorial exercises
Course: UGQuants (SSPS) > Section: Associations Between 2 Variables

Tutorial exercises

Use the tutorial session to talk through the selftest exercises (you should try to solve them at home already, but can discuss open questions in the tutorial) and work through the additional tasks (marked in colour).

1. For each of the following pairs of variables, indicate which is most likely to be the independent and which the dependent variable in any association between the variables:
  1. Respondent’s highest educational qualification and whether or not s/he has taken part in lawful public demonstration last 12 months
  2. Respondent’s highest educational qualification and father’s occupation when respondent was 14 years old
  3. Respondent’s age and respondent’s fear of crime
  4. Respondent’s sex and respondent’s personal income
  5. Respondent’s attitudes to women working less when they have family and his/her religious denomination
  6. Respondent’s housing tenure and his/her children’s level of attainment at school
2. Create a contingency table for gender (‘gndr’) and subjective health (‘health’). Answer the following questions:
  1. Are men or women more likely to believe that their health is good?
  2. What percentage of women describe their health as very good?
  3. What percentage of all cases in the table describe their health as bad or very bad?
3. Create a contingency table for highest educational qualification in the UK (‘edugb’ - choose between the two variables!) and whether or not the respondent has contacted a politician or government official in the last 12 months (‘contplt’). Answer the following questions:
  1. What percentage of all cases in the table have contacted a politician or government official in the last 12 months?
  2. Are people who have degrees or other higher education qualifications more or less likely to have contacted a politician or government official in the last 12 months?
  3. What percentage of people with no qualifications have contacted a politician or government official in the last 12 months?
4. For one of the tables in questions 2 and 3, present the data in a table in Word.
5. For the table in question 2, use the software to re-produce the table showing the differences between observed and expected counts in each cell.
6. Use the compare means procedure to examine the associations between the following pairs of variables in the European Social Survey round 5, answering the question for each one:
  1. Years completed in full-time education (‘eduyrs’) and whether respondent has boycotted any products in the last year (‘bctprd’). Are people who have spent more years in full-time education more or less likely to have boycotted products?
  2. Age of respondent (‘agea’) and his/her agreement or disagreement with the statement ‘Gay men and lesbians should be free to live their own life as they wish’ (‘freehms’). Are older or younger people more likely to be tolerant towards gay and lesbian people?
  3. Gender (‘gndr’) and number of hours normally worked in main job per week, including overtime (‘wkhtot’). On average, do men or women tend to work longer hours in paid work?