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An assignment for a university course, psc 104, on methods of public policy analysis. Students are required to collect numeric data on a variable of their choice, with a minimum of 50 observations, and analyze the central tendency and dispersion of the variable using stata. The document also instructs students to create box plots and histograms to visually represent the data. In part ii, students are asked to analyze the distributions of nader and buchanan votes in florida counties using data provided in a stata file.
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PSC 104 (10): Methods of Public Policy Analysis Data Analysis Assignment 1 Due: September 30, 2002
I. The questions in part I require you to collect data on a variable that you are interested in exploring over the course of the semester. “Collecting data” is broadly defined for the purposes of this assignment. You can get data off the web that has been compiled by others, you can type in data from a reference book, or you can collect original data of your own. The data you collect for this assignment will be the dependent variable in your analyses, so choose carefully. The data must be numeric, and you need to have a minimum of 50 observations in your data set. Be sure to answer all questions posed.
(a) Describe your data in words. What phenomenon of interest will you be analyzing? What, exactly, was the source for the data? You need to provide enough information so that your reader could find the data, given your description. Why would it be important to explain variation in the variable? For example, assume you are collecting data on cheese consumption per capita in the United States from 1945 to 1995. Why is it worth explaining variation in cheese consumption over time? (b) Describe the central tendency of your variable. What is the mean of the variable? [Use summaries, means and SDs in the StataQuest menus] What is the median of the variable? [Use summaries, median/percentiles in the StataQuest menus] Is the mean similar to the median in your data? If not, what does that mean? If so, what does that mean? (c) Describe the dispersion of your variable. What is the standard deviation of your variable? [Use summaries, means and SDs in the StataQuest menus] What is the interquartile range of your variable? [Use summaries, median/percentiles in the StataQuest menus] Does there seem to be much dispersion in your variable? (d) Now describe your variable graphically. First make a box plot [Use graphs, one variable, box plot in the StataQuest menus] Next make a histogram [Use graphs, one variable, histogram, continuous variables in the StataQuest menus]. What, if anything, do you learn from the graphs that you don’t learn from the numeric summaries of (b) and (c) above?
II. The questions in part II must be answered using the Florida data available on my web site. Go here: home.gwu.edu/~edl/florida.zip and you can download the file. Download that file, and once you have it, unzip it. Once unzipped, there will be a Stata file called FloridaVote.dta, which contains 2000 Presidential election results, by Florida County. You may prefer to save the files to a floppy disk so that any changes you make to the data will be preserved.
(a) Using the variable for the number of Nader votes, by county ( nader ) and the variable for the number of Buchanan votes, by count ( buchanan ) repeat steps (b)-(d) from part I for each variable. (b) Based on the graphs, do the distributions of the two variables look similar? Why or why not?