ABSTRACT
Many studies suggest that people who report affiliation with a religion are happier than people who say they have no religion. What other aspects of people and their social lives might also affect happiness? This chapter opens with examples of bivariate and trivariate tables. The first example presents a bivariate table between happiness and religion, both two-category variables. Controlling for gender clarifies the relationship between happiness and religion, separately for women and for men. Discussed and illustrated in this chapter are the four main outcomes of a three-variable table: replication, explanation, interpretation, and specification. The next section introduces two more advanced methods of data analysis: (1) comparisons among means, and (2) regression analysis. The research question for this section is: Do males have higher earnings or higher hourly wages than females? The final section presents a brief introduction to using statistical tests: the chi-square test for a bivariate table, the F-test and t-test applied to analyses of means, and the F-test and associated t-test applied to regression.
