SOC
103M
Fall 2007
Computer
Applications to Data Management in Sociology
TTh
3:30-4:50
SSB 101
Akos Rona-Tas
Office Hours:
TTh 2:30-3:20
by appointment
488 SSB
e-mail: aronatas@ucsd.edu
This course will introduce you to quantitative and qualitative
data management.
Accordingly, the course will be split into to halves, each devoted to
one kind
of analysis and software. In the first part of the course you will be
using
SPSS, a user friendly statistical package where all you need to do is
to click
on pull-down menus. You will learn how to input data in an analyzable,
numeric
form, then using a real data set representative of the United States,
called
the General Social Survey, you will have a chance to investigate real
social
issues. You will learn powerful ways of organizing, describing,
depicting and
exploring regularities in the data. While you will become familiar with
basic
statistical concepts, this is not a class in statistics. If you know
how to
add, subtract, multiply, divide, square and take a square-root with a
calculator, you are properly prepared.
In the second part of the course you will become acquainted with NVIVO,
a
software that helps you to organize qualitative information from
unstructured
data. You will learn about organizing and linking documents, coding,
searching,
annotating texts, organizing codes and building theories.
There are two textbooks for the course. For the first part, we
will be using, Adventures
in Social Research, by Earl Babbie et al. (ASR). For the second
part, you
will need The NVIVO Tutorial.
You can download the entire tutorial clicking on this link.. The
book is available at the UCSD Bookstore at the
There will
be 9 assignments. Each will be worth 10% of your grade and another 10%
will
come from class participation.
The class has a Web site :
http://weber.ucsd.edu/~aronatas/SOC103M.htm
It has
this syllabus, the
assignments and, contains all the statistical material covered in the
first
part of the course.
Assignments:
GENERAL
INSTRUCTIONS for the
assignments:
Please be sure to present your responses in an organized, clear, grammatically correct, paragraph format (i.e. no sentence fragments, bullets, etc.). Be sure to proof read, spell check, and make appropriate paragraph breaks when necessary. All homework must be handed in electronically via e-mail to aronatas@ucsd.edu , except for NVIVO files and folders that will stay in your personal directory on your class account.
COURSE SCHEDULE
A. QUANTITATIVE DATA ANALYSIS USING SPSS
Sept 27
Introduction
Theory and Measurement
Preparing
Data
iN CASE YOU
DON'T LIKE THE DATA ON THE CD THAT CAME WITH YOUR TEXTBOOK HERE YOU ARE
STEP-BY-STEP
INSTRUCTIONS TO DOWNLOAD OTHER VARIABLES FROM THE GENERAL SOCIAL
SURVEY
Oct 2 Introduction to the Solis Lab and SPSS
WE MEET AT SOLIS 105
Oct 4 The
Data
Editor: Data Entry
Transforming Data: Computing and Recoding, Composite Measures
Splitting Files and Selecting Cases
Describing One
Variable
Oct 9 Frequency
Distributions
Measuring Variation
Oct 11 Visual
Presentation: Bar
and Pie Chart, Histogram, Scatterplot
Describing Relationships Between Variables
Oct 16 Crosstabulation
Oct 18 The Strength of the
Relationship and the Significance of
the
Relationship
Cramer's V
Gamma an
Ordinal
Scale Measure of the Strength of the Relationship
Correlation
Coefficient
(Pearson's r) an Interval/Ratio Scale Measure of the Strength of
the
Relationship
Oct 23 Causation
and Causal
Explanation
Multivariate Analysis I
Oct 25 Causation and Causal
Explanation
Multivariate Analysis II
Assignment A4 is due
B. QUALITATIVE DATA ANALYSIS
USING NVIVO
Oct
30
Explanation and
Qualitative
Research
Nov 6 Creating
Documents
Nov 8 Coding Data
I: Nodes
Nov 13 Coding Data II:
Attributes
Nov 20 No class (individual
consultations)
Nov 22 Thanksgiving Holiday
Nov 27 Ordering Concepts
Assignment
B3 is due
Nov 29 Building
Theories
Dec
4
Discussion
Assignment
B4 is due
Dec 6 Review