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For this stage, you must submit a draft of your methods section. You should include
the information below. Some of this information can be obtained by examining the
GSS web site. Please read the example methods
section from a student's paper from prior years before starting to write
your own methods-section-draft. You may closely follow the example from this paper,
but do not copy it verbatim.1. Information on the type of methods you have used in your research paper - everyone,
of course, is doing a quantitative analysis of secondary survey data. More specifically,
you are using the 1998 General Social Survey (GSS). Explain this in the methods
section narrative.
1. A brief description of the GSS, concentrating on how the respondents were chosen,
to whom analyses based upon these date generalize, and how the data was collected:
(a) what was the sampling procedure
(b) if you were to use the entire sample
for an analysis, what would be the intended population
(c) how the information was collected
(phone or in-person interviews, etc.)
(d) how many respondents were interviewed
in 1998
2. A listing of your independent, dependent, and control variable(s).
3. Information on the survey questions on which your variables are based. E.g.,
what is the exact question (this obviously is not needed for variables such
as gender and age, but if you are using race as a variable you should explain that
it is the racial category to which the respondents self-identify.
4. Information on how you recoded all of your variables/questions. For example,
"I considered respondents 42 (the median age) and younger as 'young' and
respondents 43 and older as 'old.' I deleted from my final analysis those
respondents who did not report their age."
5. Information about what population you intend to generalize your results (after
eliminating certain response categories or people possessing certain characteristics).
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