Lab work is an important part of this course providing students with hands-on experience in sociological inquiry. We will utilize the World Wide Web, an introductory workbook and disk to analyze data from the General Social Survey.  Lab attendance and assignments constitute 35% of the course grade. All lab assignments are due on the date indicated.

Remember to make a copy of your Healey et al. Exploring Social Issues disk.

For a brief summary of what you will be doing in labs, see the Master Plan for this course.  Besides the exercises in the Healey et al. book there are web readings and some additional lab assignments.
 

Besides the lab analyses you will be doing in the Healey et.al book, Exploring Social Issues using SPSS for Windows, you will be doing some other lab assignments. Since this is an introductory sociology course, there are several useful resources and skills you will explore that may be very useful to you in subsequent social science courses and hopefully even after college!
 

You are asked to do two lab assignments that introduce you to major scholarly resources:
 

1) Using Sociological Abstracts. NYU pays a license fee so that students and faculty may use Sociological Abstracts. Sociofile, containing many thousands of sociological abstracts, is available electronically in Bobst library or on the web, for anyone logging on with an NYU ID, at: http://webspirs3.silverplatter.com/cgi-bin/waldo.cgi

Find an abstract in Sociofile that deals with one of the concepts or theories you have encountered so far in the course. To do this, you will need to learn how to access Sociofile, search for key words in it, scan the results of your search, and tag and print the abstract you want. You will be shown how to do this in lab on Wed. 2/16 or Mon. 2/28, and your assignment will be due that day. Print the abstract to attach to your assignment, and then type up answers to the following questions: 1) Is this an abstract to a published paper or something else? 2) Is it primarily a research paper or a theoretical paper? 3) What is the question being addressed in the paper? Is it a descriptive or an explanatory question? 4) What is the independent and dependent variable? 5) What data were used? 6) What is the sample and the population? 7) When were the data gathered? 8) What is the design of the study? 9) What is the major finding or claim of the paper? 10) If it is primarily a theoretical paper, what theory is it using? 11) What further questions does this abstract suggest to you?
 

2) Accessing and analyzing the General Social Survey (GSS) on the world wide web. Because the GSS was funded by the National Science Foundation with public monies, the data are now in the public domain. All of the variables you have been analyzing in the smaller dataset from the GSS in your Healey book, plus many more asked almost every year since 1972, are available at: http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/GSS99/
Go to this site and perform one of these types of analyses:

1) Look at some variable (perhaps an attitude) that interests you and analyze how the representative samples over the years have felt about that attitude or issue. Or,

2) Compare people who differ on a key variable (e.g., race, gender, age, political party, or something else) with respect to their behavior or attitude.

You can run simple cross-tabulations right at the site. If you wanted to perform more complex analyses, you could download the variables you wanted for the years you wanted and save them on your own computer as an SPSS file (or as a file compatible with some other statistical package such as SAS). Obviously, you will need to learn how to search the codebook for the names of variables on issues that interest you, and how to ask the computer at the website to perform the analysis you want. You will learn how to do this in lab on Wed. 4/19 or Mon. 4/24. You will also learn about the bibliography of published papers using the GSS that exist on various issues.

Print the table(s) you generate and type up a brief summary in your own words of what you have learned from the analysis. What further questions does it suggest to you?
 

I hope you will take with you from this course knowledge of these two resources and how to access and use them.