In this assignment, students will use data from the General Social Survey to inform a client who wants help with political messaging.

Scenario

You have been enlisted by either the Democratic or Republican Party (you choose). Your task is to mine information from the General Social Survey to find political messages that would resonate with those who are strongly supportive of your party.

Download an extract of the GSS and its accompanying codebook here

Your job is to write a brief research memo that focuses on one message that might be delivered to this audience. Use your data analysis as proof that the idea is plausible and well-reasoned.

Tasks

To perform a task like this, I recommend focusing on the relationship between party identification (PARTYID) and questions that touch upon people’s attitudes on political topics.

I recommend the following steps:

• Create a working directory to house your data, Markdown file, and other project-related materials
• Begin an R Markdown file through which to do you analysis. Click here for notes on getting started with R.
• Wrangle the data. Be sure to clean and recast the variables that you will use. Click here for notes on wrangling.
• Examine the univariate distributions of your variables to get a sense of their distribution, what is normal, and how much data varies. Use these notes on describing distributions.
• Examine bivariate distributions of your variables to see which views are strong and prevalent among those whose PARTYID scores suggest strong support for your party. Use these notes on describing distributions.
• Consider using data visualization to strengthen your submission. Check out notes here.
• If your class has learned regression analysis yet, consider using it. Check out notes here.
• The standards by which your work is evaluated is here.
• Recall the feedback given on earlier reports here.

Submit the Markdown file and polished Word report to me by email: joseph.cohen@qc.cuny.edu