General Instructions:

Use the SPSS data file produced from the National Child Development Study (NCDS) to answer the following questions. Answer all 5 questions. Five questions are equally weighted. You are asked to use this Microsoft Word document as the basis of your submission.  Please type your answers to each question in the boxes provided.  SPSS output and other documents should be appended to the submission as requested.  You are advised not to share output produced for the assignment with other students.

There is no limit to the word count. This assignment will carry 40% of the overall marks for this module. 

Question 1: (1)   Use descriptive statistics to explain how parental involvement and interests in child's education can impact on educational attainment measured in terms of their numeracy (v24_7), literacy (v28_7) and creativity skills (v25_7 and v26_7)

(2)   Use crosstabs (two-way tables) to explain how financial status of parents when children at the age of 7(use v29_7 and v30_7 as proxies for financial status) relates to any outstanding ability in children at age 11 (v37_11)

Question 2: Test the hypothesis that the gender of the child (SEX) has an effect on the child's average reading comprehension test score at age 11 years (V41_11), having adjusted for their Verbal score at age 11 years (v38_11), Non-verbal score at age 11 years (v39_11) and the total number of children in the household (V1).  You should only consider households with 5 or fewer children.  Write a paragraph describing your conclusions. 

Null hypothesis:

Alternative hypothesis:

Statistical procedure used:

Results of the analysis:

Conclusions:

Question 3: In NCDS childhood behavioural problems and emotional well being were assessed with the Rutter "A" Health and Behaviour Checklist (Rutter, Tizard, & Whitmore, 1970) completed by child's mother when the child was aged 7. There are 14 items in Rutter "A" checklist measured in a scale of 'never', 'sometimes' or 'frequently'. You are conducting a research about childhood behavioural problems and emotional well being and have been advised to study these 14 items (V3_7 - V16_7). Provide an explanation of how the key behavioural problems/ emotional well being could be established using this data.  Explain how these behavioural problems vary between girls and boys.   

Question 4: Carry out and interpret the results of a (K-means/Quick) cluster analysis using the key behavioural problems identified in question 3. You should produce a four-cluster solution. You will need to save cluster group membership as a new variable in your dataset. Select the option that produces an ANOVA table of statistics. Use this table to explain internal homogeneity and external heterogeneity of cluster membership. You could use an appropriate post-hoc test to provide an accurate explanation. Following 7-year old variables in the NCDS data set validate these clusters. How many cases belong to each cluster? By splitting the data into the four clusters and calculating appropriate descriptive statistics, and by cross-tabulation of cluster membership and 7-year old variables, write a descriptive interpretation of the four cluster groups.

Number of cases in:

Cluster 1 = ......         Cluster 2 = ......         Cluster 3 = ......         Cluster 4 = ......

Descriptions of clusters:

Question 5: Carry out an analysis to find out how well the net pay per month at the age of 23 (V43_23) can be predicted by child's education achievements at age 7 (V24_7 - V28_7) and age 11(V37_11 - V42_11). Exclude the respondents who are unemployed at the age of 23 (use variable V45_23). Remember to control for the effects of child gender (SEX) and the employment status (a dummy variable - self-employment and employment using V45_23). Write a short paragraph describing your conclusions and the statistical evidence that supports them.  Check whether these variables are suitable for regression, and compute scatter-plots to see whether a linear model is appropriate.  Be sure to mention the correlation between the variables, the regression equation, the statistics indicating statistical significance, the standard error of estimate and confidence intervals, the percentage of variance in net pay at the age of 23 that can be explained by the child's educational achievements at age 7 and 11.