Project 1: Working with and Describing Data

The purpose of this project is to become familiar with working with data in SPSS: cleaning up a raw data file, transforming variables, creating variables, computing descriptive statistics, and tabulating data in APA style. 

I have posted on Canvas a raw data file (.sav) containing respondents’ data for the following: 

• The 18-item right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) scale. 

• The 10-item social dominance orientation (SDO) scale. 

• A 6-item political intolerance scale. 

• Gender, political ideology, and political party identity.

Instructions:

• Give each variable a name. Typically, I include the name of the scale in the item, and number them sequentially (e.g., rwa1, rwa2, and rwa3, etc.). 

• Item wording is included in the label column; however, so are the instructions for responding to that item (i.e., “Please indicate your agreement with each of the following statements, using the 7-point scale below”). Delete those instructions so that all that is left is the item wording itself.

• Usually, scales have some items for which high scores are consistent with the construct (i.e., protrait) and others for which high scores are the opposite of the construct (i.e., contrait). Reverse code the contrait items on each of the three scales (i.e., if a high score on a particular item means that someone is low in RWA, SDO, or political intolerance, that item needs to be reverse-coded). Hint: 9 RWA items, 5 SDO items, and 3 political intolerance items need to be reverse-coded. Do NOT reverse-code all scale items; only reverse-code the contrait items. (see box on next page for tips on reverse coding)

• Calculate Cronbach’s reliability for each scale. This should be relatively high for each (above .80 or so); if it’s not, it means you’ve made a mistake in your reverse-coding. Hint: you have three scales, so you should have three reliability estimates. Only include the items for the particular scale of interest (e.g., if you are computing reliability of RWA, do not include SDO or political intolerance items). 

• Once you’ve verified the internal reliability of your scale items, compute the RWA, SDO, and intolerance scales by adding up the items of each scale and dividing by the number of items on that particular scale. This creates the average score of each scale for each participant. You should have three new variables appear at the end of your dataset. 

• Run frequency distributions on these three new scale variables you created (NOT the individual items), requesting histograms with normal curve.

• Run descriptive statistics (means and standard deviations) for each scale. 

Data portion: Post to Canvas your SPSS data file (.sav) and one single output file (.spv).

Final portion: Post to Canvas a Word document with a Table reporting the means, standard deviations, and Cronbach’s alphas for each of the three scales, in APA style (Note: first create this table in Excel and then export it into Word).

database-1-rspsm243.sav