ABSTRACT
In this assignment, you will do several data transformations to get your data into the form needed to answer the research questions. This aspect of data analysis is sometimes called file management and can be quite time consuming. That is especially true if you have many questions/items that you combine to compute the summated or composite variables that you want to use in later analyses. For example, in this chapter you will recode two of the math pleasure items and then compute the average of the four pleasure items to make the pleasure scale score. This is a somewhat mundane and tedious aspect of research, but it is important to do it carefully so you do not introduce errors into your data. You will learn four useful data transformation techniques: Count, Recode, and two ways to Compute a new variable that is the sum or average of several variables. From these operations we will produce seven new variables. In the last problem, you will conduct, for five of the new variables, several of the descriptive statistics that we presented in the last chapter, and we will use them to check for errors and assumptions. Finally, at the end of the chapter, we discuss how you might write about some of the descriptive results that we produced in Chapters 4 and 5. Open the hsbdata file. See the Get Data step in Appendix A for reference.
