SOAN 2120 Chapter Notes - Chapter 4: Standard Deviation, Computer Keyboard, Null Hypothesis

• School: University of Guelph
• Department: Sociology and Anthropology
• Course: SOAN 2120
• Professor: David Walters

Document Summary

The charts, graphs, and tables are there to give you, the reader, and a condensed picture of the data. Before you examine quantitative data you collected in a study to test hypotheses, you must first organize them in a different form. Data coding means systematically reorganizing raw numerical data into a form usable by computer software. You must develop rules for assigning numbers to variable attributes. Each category of a variable and missing information needs a code. For example, you want to examine gender, so assign or code the males as 1 and the females as 2. All of your rules and procedures for coding are put into a document called a codebook. You should think about a coding procedure and codebook before you collect any data. You can prepare by precoding, which means placing the code categories on the questionnaire. In the grid, each row represents a data record (i. e. , a respondent or case).