Assignment 1 Questions
Be sure to first enter your own data before answering these questions. For these questions, you’ll need to look at the results from the entries of your classmates and compare these to the data that you collected from your own interviews. For the results of your classmates to be reasonably reliable, you should wait until at least 10 classmates have posted their data before answering the following questions.
For each of the questions below, please briefly discuss any differences among the average responses across the three generations for each of the questions asked. Also, for each question, please note whenever the responses from your own interviewees present a different trend from that observed from your classmates.
- You need to compare the responses for the three different targets. The best way to compare groups of responses is to calculate the average for your class’s data for each of the targets, and then compare the averages between the three different targets. You do not need to calculate statistical tests, but you should discuss whether the averages appear different.
Think for a minute about how you could calculate the average for all the different responses that people have given, such as in question 2a where people indicated how many hours of TV a week they viewed.
The best way to do this would be to simply sum up the total number of hours that people indicated they had watched and then divide this by the total number of people that had been asked this question. So, for example, you might find that there were 53 responses to question 2a for the youngest target, and the sum total of all the hours watched was 842 hours. The average for the youngest target would then be 842/53=15.9 hours per week.
For questions like 5b, in contrast, there are no numerical values to indicate a belief in God. So to calculate this you would have to assign each response option a different numerical value, such as “I do not believe in God” =0, “I really am not sure whether I believe in God” =1, “I believe in God, but I’m not 100% sure” =2, and “I strongly believe in God” =3. Then to calculate the average you would multiply the number of people who chose each response option by this value, and add up the four products, and divide by the total number of people. So if 23 people selected 0, 14 selected 1, 34 selected 2, and 19 selected 3, the average would be (23*0) + (14*1) + (34*2)+(19*3)=139/(23+14+34+19)=1.54. This would correspond to a response about half way between “I really am not sure whether I believe in God” and “I believe in God, but I’m not 100% sure.”
- Are there generational differences in terms of the amount of TV that people watch, the amount of fun time they spend on the computer, or the amount of total time they spend engaged in electronic entertainment (i.e., total hours in 2a plus hours in 2b)? Make sure to report the average values for each target for this and all subsequent questions.
- Are there generational differences in terms of the amount of meals that people share with their family, that they share with other people, or that they have alone?
- Are there generational differences in terms of the number of monthly meetings that people participate in?
- Are there generational differences in terms of how often people participate in religious services or in terms of the strength of their religious beliefs?
- Are there generational differences in terms of their likelihood to vote?
- Are there generational differences in terms of how much they trust others?
- Are there generational differences in terms of how likely people are to obey traffic signals?
- Are there generational differences in terms of how often people visit with friends or family members?
- Are there generational differences in terms of the amount of time that people spend on themselves?
- If the responses from your own interviewees consistently yielded a different pattern than those observed by your classmates, please explain why you think the particular people you asked are different from the larger trends.
- Please summarize and discuss any evidence for cultural change in the findings that you reported above. Do you see evidence for generational change? What are the arguments of Robert Putnam regarding generational change? How have they changed, and why have they changed? Do your classmates’ findings support or contradict these arguments? Please describe how they do or do not support his arguments.
If the generations do appear to be different across the items above, please explain what factors you think are causing the generations to differ. If there are any items above for which the generations do not appear to be different in the ways that Putnam found, why do you think your classmates’ data are different from Putnam’s findings?
- Aside from cultural change across generations, can you think of any alternative explanations for why people from different generations sometimes give different responses to these questions?
