MB 313
Homework 2


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This is an exercise in creating an index. We will use the dataset describing students’ attitudes towards the environment and the paranormal (dataset = site89Para.sav) to visualize and describe the data. Here is the codebook describing the data, and here is the questionnaire.Write up your results in paragraphs answering Question 3. The homework should be typed and double spaced. It is due November 3.

  1. Let's add the paranormal items together to create a paranormal index. Go to Analyze> Scale > Reliability analysis. Click off all of the paranormal questions. Under statistics, check off descriptives = scale if item deleted, interitem = correlations.
  1. Look at Cronbach's alpha. Look at correlations. Are there any correlations that are very small or negative? Any small or negative correlation is an indicator of a scale item you may want to delete.

  2. Look at Item-Total Statistics. Are there any items that you could drop to increase the alpha? If there are, drop one item at a time and rerun the analysis until you are convinced you have a good index. Print out all of your reliability printouts. Tell me what indicators of your final index convince you that you have dropped the right variables.

This page last modified on 10/19/09