Soc. 113, Statistical and Computer Methods in Social Research

Course Outline for:

Sociology 113, "Statistical and Computer Methods in Social Research".

Professor: David D. McFarland

Web Pages for Spring 1999

Outline (this document) for course content
ClassWeb site for announcements, discussion board
Syllabus for logistics

Getting Ready. To use the computer classroom for this course, you will need to set up your personal BOLid and preference diskette.
Introduction. This course is organized around a main project, that will use one particular network facility (WWW) to access one particular dataset (GSS) from one particular archive (icpsr), and one particular statistical software package (stata) to perform one particular type of statistical analysis (multiple regression) on those data.
This introduction is deliberately terse, and aims to get people started quickly on their projects. Then a few weeks into the quarter we will return to give some attention to other things that are available but that couldn't all be emphasized in any one course.
Let's begin with an introduction to the World Wide Web, but with a particular slant: web resources for social science research. A Trip Around the World
Survey Data and Measurement Scales
- General Social Survey (GSS) overview
  - printed, from Sage
  - online, from NORC
- GSS codebook, online, from ICPSR
  - Main Codebook Pages
  - Codebook Appendices
- Types and Properties of Measurement Scales. Examples from GSS variables
- Survey procedures and missing data
- Scale Assignment.
Least Squares and Regression Analysis
- Linear and other functions; slopes and intercepts
- Slope as an interval scale computation
- Independent and dependent variables
- Notions of causal relationships: function plus mechanism
- Fitting functions to data using the Least Squares criterion
Variable Selection
- Variable Selection for Individual Projects.
- Data and Information Retrieval System, from ICPSR
  - Main Codebook Pages
  - Codebook Appendices
  - U. Variables by Year
  - Variable by Questionaire Version
  - Online Subsetting and Conversion to Portable Formats (Choose ascii/raw/flat data file format.)
Computers for Statistical Calculations
- STATA software
  - Comparison with spreadsheet alternatives
  - Comparison with specialized (e.g., LIMDEP)
  - Other general-purpose statistical software
- Selected STATA Commands for data entry, cleaning, and univariate distributions.
- Missing Data and Univariate analysis
Project and Report.
- Selected commands for regression analysis
- Regression assignment and project report
Then, after people have their projects started, as time permits, a second pass through, pausing long enough to at least notice some of the other resources we hurried past the first time through.