The General Social Survey is a massive undertaking, requiring millions of dollars and well trained interviewers around the country.  In part because the survey is financed by your tax dollars, the data from the survey are available on the internet for anyone to examine.

I put together a subset of the GSS containing over 350 variables.  This dataset is available from this website (see the Data section of the website.)  I passed around a list of these variables.  (If you lost the list, I have posted it below.)

 


In class, I showed you how you can look up variables on the list on this website.

In class, we looked at the association between gender (sex) and marital status (marital).  Then, I asked you to come up with hypotheses (essentially, guesses) about 5 other variables that you think would be related to gender. 

Your homework is to create a crosstabulation (crosstab for short) like the one I showed you in class for each pair of variables you selected.  Underneath the table, write down the results.  That is, interpret the table.  Did things turn out as you expected or not? 

So what I am asking you to do has three steps:

1. Pick a variable from the list that you think is related to gender.  Be sure to check the variable on the website at the link above.  You want to make sure you know the question associated with the variable.  Give a hypothesis (guess) about why this variable is related to gender.

2. Create a crosstabulation (crosstab).  Put gender in the columns, and the other variable in the rows.  Get column percentages (% of column). 

3. Report the results.  Did your hypothesis turn out or not?


I would like you to do this with five different variables.  We did the first step in class.  Steps 2 and 3 are homework.

2008 General Social Survey - selected variables with brief descriptions
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