SPSS exercise 1.3
From the statements below, state what the variables are, what the units of analysis are, and whether the analysis is univariate, bivariate, or multivariate.
For example: men more often have a paid job than women.
Answer:
- Variables: gender, having a paid job
- Units of analysis: people
- Type of analysis: bivariate
a. Men spend more time watching television than women.
b. Young people have more Facebook friends than older people.
c. The New York Times prints political news on the front page more often than The Telegraph.
d. The amount of sexist content in women's magazines is not high.
e. Young men read comic books more often than older women.
Hints
1 What are variables?
A variable is a characteristic of a unit of analysis. Examples of variables in a study in which students are the unit of analysis could be gender, prior education, or choice of study programme.
2 What are units of analysis?
The things we gather data about are referred to as units of analysis. Units of analysis are not necessarily people. You can make statements on the length of front-page newspaper articles based on a study. In that case, the front-page articles are the units of analysis - the things that you are making a statement about.
3 What levels of analysis are there?
The type of analysis that you carry out depends in part on the number of variables that you want to include in your analysis. An analysis using just one variable is called a univariate analysis. An analysis that compares two variables is called a bivariate analysis. An analysis involving more than two variables is called a multivariate analysis.
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