RPubs_Peer_Graded Assignment

http://rpubs.com/Michelletan78/389848

Part 1: Data (some of below comments was taken from the GSS website and/or other online sources) The General Social Survey Since 1972, the General Social Survey (GSS) has been monitoring societal change and studying the growing complexity of American society. The GSS aims to gather data on contemporary American society in order to monitor and explain trends and constants in attitudes, behaviors, and attributes; to examine the structure and functioning of society in general as well as the role played by relevant subgroups; to compare the United States to other societies in order to place American society in comparative perspective and develop cross-national models of human society; and to make high-quality data easily accessible to scholars, students, policy makers, and others, with minimal cost and waiting. GSS questions cover a diverse range of issues including national spending priorities, marijuana use, crime and punishment, race relations, quality of life, confidence in institutions, and sexual behavior The GSS aims to make high-quality data easily accessible to scholars, students, policy makers, and others, with minimal cost and waiting. The GSS uses face-to-face interviews by professional interviewers in US households - one adult is randomly selected from each household. The goal is to target a well-defined population that is representative of the target population of US adults. The GSS claims that its samples closely resemble US population distributions as reported in the Census. Conclusions drawn from the data are mostly generalizable to US adults. This survey is not an experiment or observational study and doesn’t have random assignment of respondents to the factors under consideration - thus associations can be obscured by lurking variables and bias - therefore you can’t rule out other confounding factors that may affect any discovered associations between the measured variables. Thus no causality is found only associations which could be used as a basis for future experiments/observational studies to help show causality. Part 2: Research question I am interested in what causes/influences people who grew up poor to improve their financial status as an adult - I am going to do some preliminary investigation into three potential predictor/expanatory variables : education, religious activity and political philosophy. I make a new “factor” variable for each of these categories which join the multiple potential survey responses into two categories (education into “college/no college”; religious activity into “active/not active” and political philosophy into “conservative/liberal” ). For any of these potential predictor variables that show promise in the initial Exploratory Analysis I will perform inference testing. My interest in this subject is to explore what types of life style choices could be effective in improving one’s life. Part 3: Exploratory data analysis