Research Methods
for the digitally inclined
by 
Stephen R. Schmidt

 

 

Project 2:

Archival Data Analysis


Goals: 

Select a current topic that might be addressed by archival (retrospective) data analysis.  Develop testable hypotheses based on previous research on this topic. Collect and compile the data from on-line sources.  Analyze the data for trends.  Write a report (in the APA style) with an introduction, method, results, and discussion of the research.

Voting Trends in the US:


As a class we have decided to look at voting trends, focusing of changes that may have emerged in this election year.  We generated the following working hypotheses:

Hypotheses:

  1. increased participation by minorities in 2008
  2. increased participation by people 18-25 in 2008
  3. age is a predictor of party affiliation
  4. income levels predict party affiliation
  5. Christians are Republican

Data:

A data set to address these questions can be obtained from The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press:

http://people-press.org/dataarchive/

Download the data from the following archives:

Late February 2008 Political Survey
Late March 2004 Political Survey

Analyses:

We will merge these data, and try to test the above hypotheses.  Additional hypotheses may also be proposed and tested.  These hypotheses will be testing employing t-tests (http://frank.mtsu.edu/~sschmidt/stats/2_Sample_t.pdf) and chi-square tests (http://frank.mtsu.edu/~sschmidt/stats/ChiSquare.pdf).


 


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Last Modified 10/09/2008