Sociology 357 Methods of Sociological Inquiry Exercise Two (due on March 1) General instructions: Homework needs to be typed. Please attach your STATA output to the homework. Download abortion.dta from the course website http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/~zzeng/soc357.htm. I extracted these data from the GSS cumulative data file (1972-2002) found at http://csa.berkeley.edu:7502/archive.htm. Use STATA to find answers to the following questions. When doing questions 1-6, provide answers for the combined data from 1972 to 2002, rather than for each single year. 1. What proportion of the GSS respondents is female? What proportion is male? We know that the GSS is based on face-to-face interviews. Can you find an explanation for the significant difference between the proportion of female respondents and the proportion of male respondents in GSS? 2. The following questions were asked of respondents on abortion attitudes: Please tell me whether or not you think it should be possible for a pregnant woman to obtain a legal abortion … a. If the woman's own health is seriously endangered by the pregnancy? (abhlth) b. If the woman wants it for any reason? (abany) c. If she is married and does not want any more children? (abnomore) d. If the family has a very low income and cannot afford any more children? (abpoor) e. If she became pregnant as a result of rape? (abrape) f. If she is not married and does not want to marry the man? (absingle) g. If there is a strong chance of serious defect in the baby? (abdefect) What percentage of respondents supports abortion in each scenario? Use Excel or STATA to make a graph to compare the 7 statistics. 3. What is the total number of observations for all years from 1972 to 2002? How many respondents answered each of the 7 abortion questions? 4. Create a new variable called abave, which equals the average of the seven abortion variables. What is the number of observations for adave? Why is this number smaller than the observation numbers you found in question 3?Now use abave as the best measure of abortion attitude and answer questions 5-7 with it. 5. Are men more likely to support abortion than women? Calculate the mean scores of abave for men and women. 6. Recode education into 4 categories—less than high school, high school graduates, some college, college and above. Calculate the mean scores of abave for respondents in the four educational categories. Are respondents with higher educational attainment more likely to support abortion? 7. From 1972 to 2002, did Americans become more acceptable of abortion? Use a graph to support your
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