2.133 Political conservatism and liberalism Where do Americans tend to fall on the conservative–liberal political spectrum? The General Social Survey asks, “I’m going to show you a seven-point scale on which the political views that people might hold are arranged from extremely liberal, point 1, to extremely conservative, point 7.

Where would you place yourself on this scale?” The table shows the seven-point scale and the distribution of 1933 responses for a survey conducted in 2008.

This is a categorical scale with ordered categories, called an ordinal scale. Ordinal scales are often treated in a quantitative manner by assigning scores to the categories and then using numerical summaries such as the mean and standard deviation.

a. Using the scores shown in the table, the mean for these data equals 4.11. Show that you get the mean by multiplying each score by the frequency it occurred, summing up these values and then dividing the sum by the total number of observations.

b. Identify the mode (or modal category).

c. In which category does the median fall? Why?

Transcribed Image Text:

Score Category Frequency 1. Extremely liberal 69 2. Liberal 240 3. 4. Moderate 5. 6. 7. Slightly liberal Slightly conservative Conservative Extremely conservative 221 740 268 327 68