SPSS ASSIGNMENT (50 points)
Go to the book’s study site (www.sagepub.com/bachmanfrccj2e), North America, Student Study Site, Datasets and Documentation, Homicide Dataset (and codebook). You will need SPSS to open the data.
We will be having an SPSS workshop on Wednesday, 2/28 to prepare you for this assignment.
- Describe the outcome of homicide defendants’ trials—whether they were acquitted, convicted, or insane (FUNNEL) and the sentence they received (7 options—OUTCOME). You should examine these variables using a frequency distribution, a graph, and a measure of central tendency (the one you use should depend on the level of measure of the variable). 15 points.
- Using what you know about measures of central tendency, analyze and interpret the appropriate one(s) for the following variables: age (DAGE), whether defendant received a death sentence (DEATH), and defendants’ prior incarcerations (PRINCR). 10 points
- Recode the number of previous violent arrests (PRIVIO) into none vs. one or more (so, a dichotomous measure of WHETHER—NOT HOW MANY—prior violent arrests the homicide defendants had. Run a frequency on the recoded variable. 5 points.
- Choose an independent variable and a dependent variable from this data set (specify which is which). Write a hypothesis stating how you expect the variables to be related—your hypothesis should state an expected direction of relationship. 10 points
- If your variables are not dichotomous, collapse the categories to make them dichotomous. Then, run a cross-tabulation on these data (using the newly created dichotomous variables). Obtain percentiles for categories of the independent variable (row or column). Interpret the cross-tabulations. 10 points
Please submit this assignment as one document. Please only submit your final SPSS output. Put the relevant question numbers on the output. You should submit output for every question, except #4, and every question should have a written interpretation, except #3.
