Sociology 205a Notes page

Class 1. (Tuesday, Jan 10)

Topic: Introduction to the class, strengths & weaknesses of quantitative data, overview. Goals & logic of empirical analyses in sociology.

Class 2. (Thursday, Jan 12)

Topic: LAB DAY. Introduction to SAS. We will cover user interface, basic SAS setup, writing programs, reading archived datasets, converting data from Excel to SAS, entering data by hand.

Class 2 SAS Tutorial slides. This is a powerpoint file that walks through an extended example. Try this to get you started with SAS.

Class 3. (Tuesday, Jan 17)

Topic: Graphic Display & Presentation of Summary Data & Distributions.

Class 4. (Thursday, Jan 19)

Topic: LAB DAY. Using SAS for Graphic display of data.

- I put a quick tutorial for reading a simple state-level datafile from an HTML page into Excel, then into SAS, then running univariate statistics on it. The example powerpoint file is here: dataread1.ppt. The example sas code is: dataread1_ex1.sas

- I also added a powerpoint slideshow that demonstrates downloading data from the GSS. You can get that here: gss_download.ppt. The SAS program that I write along the way can be found here: gss_distribution.sas

Class 5. (Tuesday, Jan 24)

Topic: Association & Contingency.

Class 6. (Thursday, Jan 26)

Topic: LAB DAY. Association and Contingency

Class 7. (Tuesday, Jan 26)

Topic: Probability. A SAS program for simulating rolling a dice can be found here: die_roll_example.sas

Class 8. (Thursday, Feb 2)

Topic: Lab Day. Probabilities & distributions.. An example program for recoding steps: hprices_recode.sas You might want to see the graph & regression example: hprices_read.sas

Class 9. (Tuesday, Feb 7)

Topic: Statistical Inference: Confidence Intervals & Significance Tests. A SAS program for simulating sample means: mean_sample.sas

Class 10. (Thursday, Feb 9)

Topic: Lab Day. Data merging and recoding. See election_2004_combined.sas

Class 11. (Tuesday, Feb 14)

Topic: Catching up!

Class 12. (Thursday, Feb 16)

Topic: Lab Day: Lots of stuff. We will reference these programs: scale_const.sas, dummyvartrap.sas, crime_ci.sas, aggregatdat.sas and use the crime sas dataset crime.sas7bdat

Class 13. (Tuesday, Feb 21)

Topic: Associations in categorical variables

Class 14. (Thursday, Feb 23)

Topic: Lab Day Associations in categorical variables

Class 15. (Tuesday, Feb 28)

Topic: Categorical Association

Class 16. (Thursday, Mar 2)

Topic: Categorical Association lab stuff. See also some example programs: example1.sas, examples.sas, gss_happy.sas

Class 17. (Tuesday, Mar 7)

Topic: Associations in quantitative variables: Regression Analyses.

Class 18. (Thursday, Mar 9)

Topic: Multiple Regression

Class 19. (Tuesday, Mar 14)

Topic: Multiple Regression and Interactions

Class 20. (Thursday, Mar 16)

Topic: Last Day; presentation of research results.