Professor Environ

How does the state of happiness, wealth and self-indulgent affects ones satisfaction with life?

Assignment

1) Ask an analytical research question;

2) Write a literature review to summarize how other researchers have studied our topics;

3) Operationalize the concepts relevant to our research;

4) Generate a theory to explain why we expect particular factors to be associated with one another; and

5) Specify a number of research hypotheses that require empirical verification.

6) What was the article's main research question?

7) What was the unit of analysis for the study?

8) What was the research population?

9) What kind of sample was used to answer the research question?

10) Were the methods used in the study - quantitative, qualitative, or both?

11) What was the role of generalization in the study?

12) What type of design did the study utilize?

13) How many cases were involved?

14) Did the study involve an experimental design?

15) Was the data collected cross sectional, pre-post, longitudinal, or panel?

Paper Progress

Many studies involve a brief section called Methods and Data to explain to the reader the methods you use to answer your research question. You are encouraged to write a few paragraphs to explain the methods of your study as well.

If you decided to select on a particular demographic factor to narrow the sample, then that factor is your unit of analysis. For example, if you decided to study only women, then women in the country you are studying is your unit of analysis. If you decided to study only college-educated people, then college-educated people in the country you are studying is your unit of analysis. Keep in mind that a narrow unit of analysis influences generalization.

Your project combines quantitative analysis and quantitative analysis. For the quantitative portion of your paper, you are using the World Values Survey for one point in time, which means that your sample is a cross section of the population (for the country you are studying

You are also encouraged to do qualitative analysis too by conducting a small number of in-depth interviews with people within your unit of analysis (women, college-educated, etc.). Interviews can be very effective in helping a researcher understand why there is a relationship between an independent and dependent variable. In other words, qualitative analysis is crucial for theory building.

As a result, your study involves 1) a quantitative large-n study based on data from the World Values Survey and 2) a qualitative study utilizing a number of in-depth interviews based on an accidental sample that you create. This accidental sample contains people to whom you happen to have access. You can include this information in the Methods and Data section of your paper.

Datasets and codebooks

Quantitative data is usually presented in a spreadsheet. Information on a spreadsheet is organized into rows and columns. Often, the columns represent variables and the rows represent observations. This means that the number of rows in the spreadsheet is equal to the number of observations in the data set. The number of columns is the number of variables.

To download the World Values Survey dataset go towww.worldvaluessurvey.org. Select Data & Documentation from the left hand menu, and then select Documentation/Downloads. You should see the data for the six waves. Select Wave 6 (2010-2014).

From here, you should see several files that can be downloaded. Firstdownload the questionnairethat was used during the administration of the Survey to see exactly how the questions were asked. This file is WV6_Official_Questionnaire_v4_June2012.pdf.

Reviewing this document is important for two reasons. First, the questionnaire can serve as a codebook for understanding how the numbers you will eventually see are numbered. It is impossible to understand what the numbers mean without the codebook. The codebook tells us what every value in the spreadsheet represents.

Second, the questionnaire can also resolve issues of concept measurement validity. You should check to ensure that the variables you are using are accurate measures for the variables you want. In other words you should ensure that the indicators in the survey are valid reflections of the concepts you are using for your independent and dependent variables.

Next, download the World Values Survey Wave 6 dataset for your country. This will be in a zipped file. Be sure to select SPSS version of the data. For example, for the United States (on which all of the following examples are based) the file is WV6_Data_United_States_2011_spss_v_2014_4_28.zip. You will need to provide some information about your institution and your project title before you can download the data.

The data will most likely be downloaded to the Downloads folder on your computer. Since the data is zipped, you will need to extract the data from the file. To do this, click on the zipped file in your Downloads folder and select extract all files.[1] You will be asked to choose a destination for the unzipped file. Put the file where you know you will be able to find it. Once you have SPSS installed on your computer, selecting the saved unzipped file (which is now a .sav file) should open the dataset in SPSS.