POLI 300                             PROBLEM SET #10                           due 11/18/09

CROSSTABULATIONS

Note: Take care to draw your crosstabulations reasonably neatly. Label variables and values clearly, so that any reader can understand the table.

1.         Public opinion researchers generally believe that individual presidential approval responses are highly “colored” by the respondent’s party identification — that is, Republican party identifiers tend to “approve of” Republican Presidents but not Democratic ones and conversely. More formally, researchers expect to find a strong association between PARTY ID and PRESIDENTIAL APPROVAL, the direction of which depends on the party affiliation of the incumbent President. Is this expectation sustained in the Fall and Spring 2009 Student Survey data? Determine this by constructing and interpreting a crosstabulation of V12 (Question 12) by V1 (Question 1). (Consider which variable is independent and which dependent and format the table accordingly.) Comment on your findings.

2.         Formulate and state some hypothesis (relating two variables) of your own concerning the relationship between two variables in the Student Survey data. (Do not use the pairs of variables used in Handout #10 or in class to illustrate the construction of crosstabulations.) Then test the hypothesis by constructing and interpreting the appropriate crosstabulation using the Fall and Spring 2009 data. To what extent is the data consistent with your hypothesis? Comment on your findings.