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Homework 4

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This is an exercise in creating indices and looking at the relationship between indices. 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.

1. Let's add some of the attitudes towards government items together to create a liberal/conservative index. Go to Transform> Compute and create a new variable called libcons by adding together ATG6, ATG7, and ATG9. There is already a paranormal index called ParaIndex created by adding together all of the paranormal variables.

2. Let's test the hypothesis that your attitude towards government (measured by libcons) affects your likelihood of believing in the paranormal (measured by ParaIndex). To be more specific let us hypothesize that the more conservative politically you are, the more likely you are to believe in the paranormal, thus the higher on libcons the higher you are on the ParaIndex.
   
   
3. First let's graph the relationship. Go to Graphs>Legacy dialogs>Interactive>Scatterplot, specify the variables to be graphed, and go to fit and specify regression. (This is all explained in your lecture notes.) What does the graph tell you?
   
   
4. Next let's do a regression by going to Analyze>Regression>Linear, and specifying the variables. How much variance does libcons explain in the paraindex? Is it significant? What is the relationship between libcons and paraindex? Is the coefficient for libcons significant?
   
   
5. Homework is due Thursday, December 3, 2009.
   
   

This page last modified on 11/11/09