Sociology 2205A/B Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Nominal Level, Dependent And Independent Variables
9 Sep 2016
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Document Summary
Stats are math tools used to organize, summarize and manipulate data. Data are scores, or variables, or information expressed as number. Variables are traits that can change values from case to case (ex: age, gender, social class) Cases are entities from which data are gathered (ex: people, groups, provinces, countries ) Summarize relationships between 3 or more variables (multivariate) Many schemes used to classify variables including: ind/dep variables, discrete or continuous, noir variable. Level of measurement of variable tells us which stats are permissible and appropriate. Categories must be mutually exclusive so that classification is clear. Categories must be relatively homogenous (equal in #) Scores are different from each other but cannot be treated as number. Scales can be ranked from high to low or from more to less. Survey items that measure opinions and attitudes are ordinal. If we can distinguish between scores of variable using term such as more, less, higher, or lower the variable is ordinal.
