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Inquiry Based Thinking: Students will formulate focused questions and hypotheses, evaluate existing knowledge, collect and analyze data, and draw justifiable conclusions.

This assignment is to help familiarize you with the General Social Surveys (GSS) that sociologists often use in research. We will be using the GSS Data Explorer and examining Key Trends at this website:

https://gssdataexplorer.norc.org/trends

NORC is the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, established in 1941, and is one of the largest independent social research organizations in the United States. The GSS is a sociological survey on contemporary American society created and regularly collected since 1972 by NORC and funded by the National Science Foundation.

Directions:

1. Go to the GSS Data Explorer Key Trends website. You may have to free account. The landing page should look like this:

As we are looking at stratification and inequality in this seminar, I suggest you select a question from Gender & Marriage, Civil Liberties, or Current Affairs for the first part of this assignment. You'll get a chance to pick any topics for the second part.

Choose a data trend you wish to explore by clicking the title. A new page will open, and you'll see the question in green, question responses (pull down menu of responses), and breakdown (variables include age, social class, education, health, marital status, race, sex, etc.). For demonstration purposes, I selected "Differences & Discrimination" under Civil Liberties. This is what opens:

Scroll down the page and you'll see a graph and the question text for the variables. I want you to get in the habit of reading the question text so you can be sure the question is asking what you think it's asking. You can hover your mouse or trackpad over the graph to see data for each year the question was asked.

In this example, we see the question of affirmative action was first asked in 1994 and last asked in 2021. The range of all the survey participants (breakdown = total) who selected "Strongly Support" (question response) over the past 27 years (1994-2021) was from a low of 8% (1998) to a high of 15% (2016 and 2018), and most recently 12% (2021).

If you hold down the green arrow (at end of question), you can see all the questions in that section. Above the question you can see all the trend topics and can easily move back and forth between them.

As an example, I picked the "Should communist book be removed from public library?" question, the "Not remove" (question response), and the "highest degree" variable (breakdown).

My hypothesis (the relationship between variables) is that those with more education will say that the communist book should not be removed. I was correct and we can see in 2021 that 84% of those with a college degree, 74% of those with a high school degree, and 62% of those with less than a high school degree selected "not remove." This doesn't surprise me, but what does is how far those with less than high school have come in the past 49 years, from just 33% to 62%. I don't really know what explains that, other than most Americans support free speech.

So now you get to try it. This assignment is meant to give you a chance to examine actual social science research and explore topics that interest you and have some fun. It's the same GSS data we looked at before, just a different tool, and some pre-selected questions.

For your report, I want you to select

2 questions, and tell me why you picked them;

2 variables for each question and why you selected them;

formulate hypotheses for each variable, state what you think the relationship will be;

test them with 1-2 responses for each question; and

include one graph for each question, being sure the labels are visible.

Be sure to read the full question text at the end of the page. Sometimes the question isn't asking what you think it's asking.

I'd like you to first examine age, subjective class identification, race, and sex (related to our inequality seminar), then you can choose some other variables such as highest degree, condition of health, marital status, political affiliation, or region from the pull-down menu under "breakdown." Hispanic specified and citizenship status aren't always helpful, but it depends on the questions asked.

Hover your mouse/track pad over the graph lines to see how the percentages have changed through the years. Pick an interesting graph, take a screen shot, paste it into your paper and tell me why you found it interesting. (On my Mac I just use shift/option/command/4 to take a screen shot, not sure what you'd do with other makes, but I'm sure google has an answer).

See GSS Data Trends Worksheet - that is what you will upload

CT Student Outcome

Inquiry Based Thinking: Students will formulate focused questions and hypotheses, evaluate existing knowledge, collect and analyze data, and draw justifiable conclusions.

This assignment is to help familiarize you with the General Social Surveys (GSS) that sociologists often use in research. We will be using the GSS Data Explorer and examining Key Trends at this website:

https://gssdataexplorer.norc.org/trends

Directions:

1. Go to the GSS Data Explorer Key Trends website. You may have to create a free account. Follow along with the separate instruction sheet.

Select two questions, pick variables and responses, formulate hypotheses, collect and analyze the data, and discuss your findings. You can use the tables, below, or create your own. Save your paper as Your Name and upload to Blackboard by Sunday May 29, 11:59 PM.

Your Name:

Question 1 :

Explain why you picked it. What is your hypotheses? Which two variables did you try? (age, sex, race, social class, marital status, education, etc. from the pull-down menu). What reposes did you try? (strongly agree, agree, strongly disagree, disagree, etc.). What were the results? Were you surprised by the results? What do you think explains your results?

It's okay if your hypotheses were incorrect. That's actually helpful, as now we know we need to test something else instead.

Q1 1: (write out the question here)

Variable 1 Response 1 Your Hypothesis Right (V) or wrong (X)

Response 2 Your Hypothesis Right (V) or wrong (X)

Variable 2 Response 1 Your Hypothesis Right (V) or wrong (X)

Response 2 Your Hypothesis Right (V) or wrong (X)

Take a screen shot of one interesting graph related to your Question 1 and discuss what it means and why you found it interesting. Make sure your screen shot includes the question and response of interest or include a key with explanations.

Question 2:

Now describe the second question, variables, and responses you tried, as well as your hypothesis and whether you were right or wrong. Answer the same questions as you did for the first one. Take a screen shot of an interesting graph related to Question 2 and discuss what it means.

Q2 (write out the question)

Variable 1 Response 1 Your Hypothesis Were you Right (V) or wrong (X)

Response 2 Your Hypothesis Right (V) or wrong (X)

Variable 2 Response 1 Your Hypothesis Right (V) or wrong (X)

Response 2 Your Hypothesis Right (V) or wrong (X)

Conclusions: Overall what are your thoughts on this assignment, the GSS data trends, and the NORC data explorer tool?

https://gssdataexplorer.norc.org/trends