Statistics Assignment

Tables Assignment

For this assignment I want you to read the two example research papers (which are from previous Methods of Research classes) and design tables that are modeled off of what those papers use. A few notes on those tables:

1. There are differences between the table designs in the two papers - I don't care if they are exactly the same, I just want you to make use of the basic presentational design of the tables in the papers.

2. Making tables isn't an exact science - what I want you to learn is a way to effectively present the results of your analyses in a way that conveys the necessary information in an organized and coherent manner.

For this assignment, I want you to use a variant of the congress.gdt data set that you used on the multiple regression assignment (it can be found in this week's assignment folder). You will make use of the following variables:

number of articles about members of Congress (art_count)

ideological extremity (dwnom1abs, which goes from '0', which is ideologically moderate, to '1', which is ideologically extreme, and is a continuous variable)

Congressional session (cong)

partisanship (pid, 0=Democratic, 1=Republican)

whether the member of Congress is a committee chair or not (commchair, 1=committee chair, 0=not committee chair)

whether the member is a part of Congressional leadership (alllship, 1=member of leadership, 0=not member of leadership).

Do the following:

1. Create a table of summary statistics on the continuous variables art_count and dwnom1abs that presents the means and standard deviations. Summary statistics for the variables can be found in Gretl by going to View > Summary Statistics.

1a. Interpret the means and standard deviations.

2. Create a correlation table between the number of articles and all of the other variables, being sure to indicate significance levels of each correlation in some way.

2a. Interpret the correlations.

3. Create one regression table presenting the results of two models. See example paper #1 in particular on how to do this. These models are:

A regression explaining the variance in article counts using ideological extremity.

A regression model explaining the variance in article counts using all of the other variables.

3a. Interpret the results of the regression models.

4. In each of your interpretations, be sure to explain the results using complete sentences and the language we've been working on through past assignments. The example research papers are good examples of this.