Homework Exercises
This page is part of the materials supporting Sociology 109. This course is offered by Robert Hanneman in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Riverside. If you have any comments, questions, or suggestions, please feel free to contact the instructor.
During the Spring Quarter of 2001-2002, you may access this site through the UCR campus instructional web site. This gives you access to discussion groups, news, and other features.
The best way to learn about processing data is processing data. We have designed a number of exercises to help you practice with some of the techniques taught in the course. Some of these exercises are very quick and simple, some are a bit more complicated. As you work on the exercises, don't hesitate to consult with other members of the class, your instructor, or your T.A. Remember, however, that the work you turn in for grading must be uniquely yours. You can use the links below to jump to detailed discussions of each of the homework exercises:
This is a short exercise for you to try out a few tasks:
1. Go to the course web-site, find the discussion
forums, and leave a short message about yourself in the
"Introductions" page. While you're at this web site, check out
the announcements, grade book, lecture slides, and other resources available in
the various sections.
2. Find the personal information part of the site and leave an email
address for people to write to you about course-related materials (if you have
an email service, you may wish to leave this one) if you don't have an ISP, find
out what your campus email address is (see the student help desk in Watkins) and
leave this email address.
3. Use the Windows accessory program "paint" to create a small
graphics file, and save it in .bmp format
4. Use a word processor (MS Word, wordpad, or some other application) to
create a small file describing the areas of research in sociology that interest
you most. Save this file as an ASCII text file.
5. Use a web browser to find a web page that has content relevant to a
research topic you described in part 4. Save this web page in .html
format.
6. Use an email program (like Eudora or MS Outlook) to write a short note
to your instructor. Attach the graphics file and text file that you made, and
attach the web page that you found.
Return to the index of the "Homework" page.
Your task in this exercise is to locate some research resources on the Internet. You will be using some of these materials later in the course (and, you might also want to use them for term paper in another course). You should use the web-searching tools that you've learned in lectures to create a text report (send it to your TA as an attachment) that shows...
Use the Internet to locate at least...
1) Five books on a research topic of interest. Save the records from
your search as a text file.
2) Three or more relevant research articles that are available on
line. Again, save the citations to a text file.
3) Five or more web sites that contain relevant materials -- save the web
addresses of these cites for inclusion in your report.
4) One or more sets of statistical information relevant to your topic.
Return to the index of the "Homework" page.
The analysis of texts (written, audio recorded, or video-recorded) is commonly used in the social sciences to identify and interpret patterns of behavior, and to test theories about social structure. In this exercise, you will examine two texts -- minutes of meetings of the Salt Producers Association of America in 1930 and 1950.
As a first step, you should click here to retrieve the data from a web page where it has been stored. Information on how to do this is stored with the data.
Your assignment is to:
1) using the first document (minutes of the meeting in 1930), and treating paragraphs as the units of analysis, prepare an index of the document that identifies the persons, organizations, and events cited in the document. This is an example of using the "manifest content."
2) using both documents (minutes of 1930 and 1950), solve the following problem. We are interested in demonstrating that the issues of main concern to the membership of the Salt Producers Association were quite different in 1930 and in 1950. You are to code the topics discussed at each meeting (usually paragraphs, but sometimes less, and sometimes more) as dealing with one of the following:
a) association membership business (election of officers, readings of minutes, making plans for meetings of
the association, etc.).
b) political and lobbying activities (federal regulation, tariffs, etc.)
c) industry affairs (pricing, competition, new technology)
d) informational and research activities
e) ceremonial and ritual activities (welcoming guests, giving awards, etc.).
Code the subjects discussed in each document according to this coding scheme, and report the number and distribution of concerns at the two points in time. This is an example of using a coding scheme (not a very sophisticated one) to study the latent content, or meaning displayed by texts.
Return to the index of the "Homework" page.
This assignment does not require actual hands-on computer work (other than to write-up your answer and submit it for grading). Rather, I would like you to think about a research problem that one of the Professors here is working on, and offer advice about how a relational data base program might assist her in her work.
The researcher with whom we are consulting is involved in a study of mergers between large American corporations. She is interested in collecting information about a large number of mergers that occurred in the 1980s, so that she can identify patterns of involvement by certain individuals, kinds of individuals, and organizations. The information that she needs to keep track of is quite complicated: there are a large number of mergers (several hundred); in each merger, two or more companies are involved -- but the same company can be involved in one or more mergers over the period we are studying; we are also interested in the individual people involved in making deals: who are the members of the boards of directors of each firm, who is the CEO and CFO (chief executive officer, chief financial officer), and outsiders who play roles in making the deals happen (e.g. brokers and bankers). Again, individual people can be involved with more than one company, and more than one deal. Sometimes, the same individual can play different roles (our researcher has identified three "roles": buyer, seller, and broker) in different deals (being a buyer in one, a seller in another, and a broker in a third).
Our researcher would like to be able to record all of this information efficiently (i.e. making as few repeated entries of information). She would like to be able to quickly and easily answer questions like: how many times was Fred Smith involved in mergers, what roles did he play? Of the deals that were made by company Z, how many of them had brokers who were not members of the board of directors?
Your job is this:
Design (you do not have to actually build one) a relational data base that will help our researcher efficiently store and retrieve the information she needs for her study. Your design should specify: what tables of data will be set up, and what kinds of information you will store in each table; it should specify how the tables will be linked, and what kind of relation (one to many, one to one, many to one) is involved in each link. And, your design should provide and example of 1) a data entry form 2) a query, and 3) a report that you might develop to help the researcher.
Return to the index of the "Homework" page.
For this exercise, you are to:
Return to the index of the "Homework" page.
Prepare a pie-chart that shows the number of persons and percentage of the United State's population that resides in the four regions you defined in the previous exercise. To do this, follow these steps:
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In this exercise, you will use the quantitative data set on the 50 United States states to do some data manipulation, graphics, and statistical analysis using SPSS. If you don't know anything about statistics yet, that's ok. If you have already had a course where you've used SPSS, this assignment will be a review of things you've probably already done (but that's ok, too -- practice makes perfect).
If you don't already have a copy of the states data set on the computer you are using, use ftp to obtain a copy from our web site.
Read the data set in Excel to make sure that it is complete, clean, and has variable names stored in the first row. Use Excel to make any editing changes. If you make any changes to the data, make an entry in your "data log" (a text file that you should always keep when working with quantitative data to keep track of things you have done).
When the data are ready, import them into SPSS, check to make sure that they are ok, and save the data as an SPSS data set.
Now you are ready to do some data manipulation and basic processing
Cut-and-paste this output to a word document where you can use it to prepare a brief report on your procedures and results. For your next step in this (kinda long...) exercise...
Cut-and-paste the relevant output into a report and submit
it as an attachment to the TA for grading.
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In the last exercise, you did some statistical analysis regarding income and crime differences among American states. In this exercise, you will create a presentation to accompany your research report on this topic. Imagine that you are going to give a 10-15 minute oral report about the relationship between income in states and the crime rate in states.
Using MS Powerpoint, create a slide show to accompany your talk. You should proceed as we have in lecture -- first creating an outline, then developing some text content, and including some of the statistical and graphical results from SPSS and/or Excel.
When you've finished your presentation (or, when it is due -- whichever is first), save the file as a .ppt file and email it as an attachment to your TA for evaluation.
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This exercise has still to be developed. More details will be provided in class when I find out the procedures for creating personal web sites for students.
In this exercise, you will create a basic home page, two or more pages containing some content (a table of data on one, a graphic on another), link the pages together, and publish your website to the internet. You will submit this assignment by emailing the address of your web-site to the TA, who will visit your site.
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