DRAFT INDIVIDUAL CHECKPOINT: Individual section draft

This is a checkpoint. It will be assessed by looking at your team Google Doc submission; your work on your shared project will automatically be updated as you continue to work on the project.

For this checkpoint, please have each individual on the team write up an analysis on the model(s) they have previously run. Your submission should be written in paragraph form as it might appear in a final report. Outline form is not acceptable for your submission.

Each individual analysis should be written in the corresponding analysis subsections.

Recall your section headings should have bene changed to more meaningful titles and still (temporarily) include the name of each team member as part of the section header.

Completing the above (and refreshing your table of contents) will automatically create an updated project outline.

Each of your sections might include the following:

DEPENDENT VARIABLE 1

We are interested in…[describe the dependent variable, including how it was measured, what the response options were, if applicable, and using descriptive statistics or confidence intervals as appropriate (univariate analysis) Consider including a graphic to visually describe this dependent variable.]

X DOES/DOES NOT IMPACT DEPENDENT VARIABLE 1

[Report on the results of your bivariate analysis (only the one where you see if x correlates with y) and the results of your multivariate analysis (does x correlate with y even in the presence of other z variables?) Be sure to thoroughly describe the x variable (including descriptive stats) and list the z variables in a descriptive way (we should at least know level of measurement and the variable names used here should be descriptive of what the variable actually represents). What do the results mean? What does this tell us? Why do we care? Consider including a table to summarize your results.]

1. Purpose of the analysis (what you are trying to discover).
2. A very brief description of the dependent variable (including level of measurement and an appropriate measure of central tendency)
3. A very brief description of the independent variable and controls (including level of measurement and an appropriate measure of central tendency)
4. A description of how you expect these two variables to be related to each other in a causal relationship and why (provide your reasoning for why your independent variable might cause your dependent variable, if possible, how and why the independent variable could be expected to occur before the dependent variable, etc.)
5. Name the statistical test you used for the analysis. (For binary dependent variables, use logistic regression. For most ordinal dependent variables, use ordinal logistic regression. For interval variables, use linear regression.) Provide a sentence about why you used that test.
6. Provide the results from the test and provide the technical interpretation.
7. Provide the substantive interpretation of the test.
8. Describe caveats/limitations to your conclusions, including how you tried to limit validity issues.
9. Present a table containing the variables, regression coefficients, test statistics and p-values. If you are performing logistic regression or ordinal logistic regression, include factor change coefficients (a factor change coefficient is e^b, where e is the natural number and b is the coefficient in your regression output).
10. Interpret the relationships of ALL of the research variables (independent variables you explicitly care about) to your dependent variable.
11. Interpret the relationships of the statistically significant control variables (independent variables you include only to rule out spurious relationships) to your dependent variable.
12. Report and interpret the R-squared value, adjusted R-squared value, if appropriate (if it's reported, it's appropriate).
13. Discuss the regression results, answering the substantive questions raised in part 1 and providing any relevant conclusions or implications from this analysis. What further questions might need to be addressed? What variables were not included that should have been? Be brief--you can go into more detail in your final report. Do be careful not to overreach your data.