Stat 280 Lab #8 (and last): Free Style

Preliminaries

The dataset is located at: http://www.stat.rice.edu/~hflores/stat280_gmdavis/

Select "stat280L8.txt".

The variables are defined as follows:

UID - Unique ID
AGE - recorded age of respondent
SEX - recorded sex of respondent (M = Male, F = Female, NA = No response given)
ECON - respondent's given socio-economic status, measured on the following scale:
	1 = Poor
	2 = Lower middle class
	3 = Middle class
	4 = Upper middle class
	5 = Wealthy

Q1 - Respondent was asked the following question: "What is your political party preference?"
	R = Republican
	D = Democrat
	I = Independent
	O = Other
	NA = No response

Q2 - Respondent was asked the following question: "About how many hours of television do you watch each week?"

Q3 - Respondent was asked the following question: "How many people have you murdered in your lifetime?"

Q4 - Respondent was asked the following question: "What do you think is wrong with our country today?"

Q5 - Respondent was asked the following question: "On a scale of 1 to 5, with the following scale:

1 - Strongly disagree
2 - Disagree
3 - Neutral
4 - Agree
5 - Strongly Agree

What is your opinion of the use of weapons of mass destruction for the purpose of defending our nation?"

Objective:  To apply "everything" you have learned in one final data analysis assignment

Setup

A survey team was hired to randomly survey 100 Americans from across the country.  The surveyors recorded each respondents' age, sex, and assigned a grade for socio-economic status based on the respondent's income.  The surveyors subjectively used the following scale for measuring socio-economic status:

Yearly income		ID
---------------------		--
$0 - $25k 		1
$26k - $50k		2
$51k - $75k		3
$76k - $100k		4
$101k+			5

The surveyors also recorded responses to 5 questions that their employers were interested in.

Analysis
You must analyze and interpret the data using any of the tools that you have learned in lab and in class.  You are, as the title of the lab implies, completely free to use all of your critical thinking skills and data analysis techniques to figure out what is going on with the data (or if there is anything at all).
Look back at your previous labs and examine what might be done in similar circumstances.  Specifically, concentrate on easy to understand data plots, descriptive statistics, splitting the data by variables (sex for instance) to look for differences, and regression.

Final Report
Your final report should be typed and structured in the following sections: Title Page, Summary, Design, Results, Discussion.

Title Page - Should include your name, date, and Rice ID number.  At the top, you should create a title for your report (do not reproduce the title for the lab).
Summary - A brief paragraph which summarizes what you did and what you found.  Should be no more than 10 typed lines.
Design - Describe (as completely as possible) what you did to analyze the data, including some rationale for doing what you did (do not include results)
Results - Describe (as completely as possible) what your results were.  Include numbers, plots, pictures, and vivid descriptions of your results (do not interpret these results just yet, just tell me what happened when you did the stuff in Design)
Discussion - NOW INTERPRET YOUR RESULTS.  Be as complete as possible.  Also in this section, discuss what you felt were the limitations to what you did, limitations inherent in the data, and limitations of your study overall.

Some notes:
1. So if you're asking yourself, "what the heck am I supposed to do?"  Look back at your previous labs.  Critically think about the data.  Try to figure out what is going on.  Try to find patterns, or show that patterns are not likely to exist.  Be creative.  Don't hesitate to email us with questions.
	
2. I wrote this lab knowing full well that EVERYONE is going to approach this in a different way, and that's OK.  There's no completely "correct" way to examine this data.  We will be checking to see if you understand the tools that you used in previous labs AND if you can critically think about what is going on with the data.  As such, you can do as little or as much as you like, but be warned.  You should know enough NOT to turn in a few histograms and some descriptive statistics OR to just do everything we've ever done with data that you know how to do on the computer and turn in a heap of output.