A3: Planning your Analyses

Published

November 4, 2024

Overview

You have two goals for this week:

  1. Revise your survey instruments to incorporate the feedback you received.
  2. Draft a 1-2 page memo summarizing your project and upload this document to canvas.

Revising your survey instruments

You all have received detailed feedback on your projects. Between now and Sunday, you need to incorporate that feedback into your design:

Put yourself in the shoes of the survey taker. Use Qualtrics preview feature to test your survey. Get a sense of the flow. Do some questions feel particularly long? Are some response options unclear. What are you really trying to get at with your survey? Do your items or treatments accomplish that goal.

Drafting your memo

You memo should contain the following:

  1. A three sentence summary of your project:
    • We are interested in…
    • To study this question we do…
    • We expect to find
  2. A list of the key components of your design. This should include:
    • The dependent variable
    • The key predictor variable
    • Other relevant predictors/covariates
    • Overview of any random assignments.
  3. At least two formal expectations:
    • You can format these as hypotheses like H1 and H2, but however you write them, they should state in one sentence a clear, testable expectation.
    • Start with your most general expectation then move to more specific comparisons
    • Be specific. Instead of saying “We expect political knowledge to vary with media use” say, “H1: We expect that political knowledge will increase with news consumption”
  4. Translate these expectations into empirically testable implications.
    • Think in terms of means or averages, or regression coefficients
    • If H1 is true, then the average level of political knowledge among high news consumption respondents should be higher than the average level of political knowledge among low news consumption respondents.

Due by Sunday, November 4, 2024

By 11:59 pm on Sunday, you will do the following:

  1. Upload your memo to canvas answering the questions above
  2. Note any last changes to the survey instrument