Learning Objectives

  1. What motivates quantitative analysis? What are its strengths and limitations?
  2. What is the General Social Survey? Why is it a valuable resource for sociology?
  3. How do you construct a frequency table? How do you interpret it accurately?
  4. How do you calculate the mean, median, and mode of a variable? How do you calculate range and interquartile range? How do you interpret each of these statistics?
  5. How do you construct a bivariate table or “crosstab”? How do you interpret it accurately?
  6. What is the benefit of using control variables in quantitative analyses, and of using multivariate analyses more generally?