What’s Fuzzy on September 22, 2011? Question What would be an example of our homework? Would an example be gender and political party or something else? Response An example is the relationship between gender and efficacy or that politics and government is too difficult to understand. Once you pick an independent and dependent variable it is at that point you develop your hypothesis? Typically when we research something we want to know more about the dependent variable e.g. support for gun control, opposition to abortion, car fatalities or crime rates. Is there some kind of training software for using PASW and can you go slower when teaching how to use the statistical software. I do not know how to use this data graph and I am not clear on independent and dependent variables I would like to review the: Define simple bar> Summaries for group cases. If you believe in the ‘gender gap’ then you could guess that gender is an indication of a person’s political party affiliation. That would be a hypothesis too. There are popular notions as to why these situations exit. YOUR guess is the independent variable you can pull from the data set and your hypothesis is the connection between the independent and dependent variable. For example, you might guess that women are less knowledgeable about government and politics than are men. Your hypothesis would be gender is correlated with feelings of political efficacy as defined by views on whether government and politics are too difficult to understand. There are a number of recommended tutorials in Powermutt. Please see: http://www.csupomona.edu/~jlkorey/POWERMUTT/links.html#SPSS for options. Yes, I will try to go slower. I am from the east coast and I tend to talk fast but if I am going to fast tell me to sloooow it down. Let me recommend Chapter 1 of Powermutt the discussion of “social science”. See if this definition of independent and dependent variables makes sense to you. To make a graph select GRAPH > LEGACY DIALOGS> BAR> SIMPLE (click define). Select “other statistic (e.g. mean)” button and place the DEPENDENT VARIABLE in the box “Variable” and the INDEPENDENT VARIABLE in the box called “Category Axis”. The picture will either show like boxes or unlike boxes. If there are unlike then there MAY be a significant relationship.