Pick any one of the data sets posted on the companion website. Look at the codebook to understand the variables that were included in the data set. Using either SPSS/PASW or R-Commander, open the data file for the data set.

Select a variable that sounds interesting, and do the following:

a) Glance at the column in the data set for that variable to see the types of values that appear.

List them.

b) If it is a categorical variable, create a frequency table for it and a bar chart.

c) If it is a numerical variable, set up a histogram and look at descriptive statistics for the variable, such as its mean, median, standard deviation, and variance. Describe the “bins”

that were created by the software to create the histogram.

d) If it is a numerical variable, look at its boxplot. Discuss what the boxplot shows about the distribution.