EXERCISES AND REVIEW QUESTIONS

PART ONE: GETTING STARTED

Before attempting these questions read through Chapters 1, 2 and 3 of the SPSS Survival Manual.

Designing a study

1.1 When choosing a scale for use in research, what are the two main characteristics you need to be aware of?

1.2 What are the two main types of reliability of a scale?

1.3 What measure is often used to indicate the internal consistency of a scale?

1.4 If you read that a scale had a Cronbach alpha value of .4 what would you think?

1.5 There are many different types of validity of a scale. Describe three.

1.6 If you were designing a questionnaire and wanted to measure respondents’ ages, which of the following formats, (a) or (b), would be better? Explain your choice.

(a) Please tick one of the following categories to indicate your age:
18-30 ___
31-45 ___
46-60 ___
61-80 ___
81+ ___

(b) Please indicate your age in years: _______

Preparing a codebook

1.7 There are a number of rules that must be obeyed when choosing variable names to use in SPSS (see Chapter 2). Use the following questions to review some of these rules.

(a) Can a variable name start with a number?
(b) What is the maximum number of characters that a variable name can have?
(c) Can variable names contain spaces?

1.8 For each of the following, indicate which is a suitable variable name. If not suitable, explain why.

(a) *q1
(b) and
(c) religion
(d) martialstatus
(e) a110q
(f) incom.hous
(g) 5optim
(h) optim5

Getting to know SPSS

1.9 In Chapter 3 of the SPSS Survival Manual you are taken on a guided tour of the basics of SPSS. The best way to learn this program is by using it. Open the data file survey.sav. To get you familiar with the program, try some of the activities below.

(a) Using the Data Editor window, go to the bottom of the file (using the scroll bar) and find out the ID number of the last case in the file.

(b) Explore the different menus available in SPSS.
• Click on Graphs and find out what types of graphs are available.
• Click on Analyze and discover the wide range of statistics available.

(c) Practise using the dialogue and sub-dialogue boxes by clicking on Analyze and then on Frequencies. Next, highlight the following variables and move them into the Variables box: sex, age, marital, educ, op1, op2, op3, op4, op5, op6. Then, move these variables out of the Variables box and use Cancel to escape from the dialogue box.

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