Stat 321 - Assignment 3
This homework assignment is to illustrate the interface between other types of data base
software and the SAS system. The simplest input mode for SAS is what is called “List
Input”. To use list input, the data values in a row of the data base (spreadsheet, matrix,
etc.) must be separated by blank spaces. The object here is to manipulate the given data
base into a suitable form so that it can be copied and pasted into a SAS program after the
“cards;” statement. There are two parts to this assignment, and you will have to do the
initial parts of each in the Computer Lab in Temple, 3305. You will be using two
software packages; one is SPSS and the other is NCSS.
a. On the “L” drive under “Faculty” and “JamesDavenport > Stat321” there is a
folder called “Assignments”. Within that is a folder called “hw03”. There is a
data set named GSS2002.sav. This is an SPSS data set. Copy that file from the
L-drive to a suitable work area on your local machine.
Or you can download this data set form my Stat321 Web site. Click on “Stat321
button > Homework button > 3”. The link is there for this download.
Once you have the file, double clicking that file should open it in SPSS. You can
then export that data by using the “Save As” command. Here is the objective.
Export the two variables “marital” and “age”. Write a SAS program that will read
these two variables into a SAS data base, and then execute the following
commands. This should produce a frequency table on the discrete variable
“marital”, provide summary statistics on “age”, and provide a histogram on “age”
and a bar chart on “marital”. Don’t print the data; it is very long.
proc freq data = GSS2002;
tables marital;
proc univariate data = GSS2002;
var age;
proc chart data = GSS2002;
vbar age marital;
title "Bar Chart of Ages in GSS-2002";
b. On the “L” drive do the same thing with the NCSS data set comp_strength.S0
(double click this file to open in NCSS). You will need both the *.S0 and *.S1
files in the active directory. Then do a Proc Univariate on “pounds”. Likewise,
the NCSS data sets can be downloaded from the Stat321 web site as described
above.