Lab 1 Instruction 0126

.docx

School

University of Nevada, Las Vegas *

*We aren’t endorsed by this school

Course

100

Subject

Political Science

Date

Dec 6, 2023

Type

docx

Pages

Uploaded by DukeElephantPerson860

PSC 302 Research Methods in Political Science Lab 1 January 26, 2022 In Lab 1, you are going to learn some basic calculations and functions in Excel. HW 1 (5%) is a question that needs the combination of all the functions you will learn today. Imagine you work for an NGO trying to enhance the civil society in Nevada, and you want to raise the turnout rate for the upcoming presidential election. As you have observed in Lab 0, turnout rate is not a constant across time and across counties. In 2020, Humboldt had the highest turnout rate (88.75%) and Mineral had the lowest (74.36%). Clearly, turnout rate is a “variable.” Political scientists are interested in variables and try to “explain” the variation. Step 1. / division and drag (function copying) In Lab 0, you created a dataset of the turnout rate of each county in 2020. You can find it in the Lab 1 material folder in Webcampus. The dataset looks like this:

Turnout is costly. You may argue that the different turnout rate is due to how and when people cast the ballot. Therefore, we explore how Nevada residents voted in 2020. We want to know what percentage of voters in each county chose to vote on and before the Election Day. Please create a new variable named “Election Day Turnout Percentage” on a new column I, which is the number of ELECTION DAY TURNOUT divided by TOTAL TURNOUT. Click cell I1 and type “Election Day Turnout Percentage.” It is a good habit to keep the variable names on row 1. “/” means division. You can type “=D2/C2”, or you can use your mouse to choose the two cells, then press enter to confirm. “=D2/C2” is a function in Excel. It tells Excel what to do. “=” cannot be ignored, or Excel will consider it as a text, not a function. You will get a number 0.097904285, which means that “ among all 252,563 people voted in 2020 in Washoe county, 9.79% of them voted on the Election Day. ” It is also possible that you get a 0. Don’t be panic! It is due to the format setting in Excel. Excel thought either your C or D or I column as a “text”, not “number”, so it does not know how to divide texts (sin(x)/n is not six, after all.). To solve this bug, choose the Column I, C, and D  Format Cells  Set that cell as a Number with decimal places 4  OK.  You will see 0.0979 in I2.

Then you wanted to apply the same function to all county, and…you do not need to type 18 times. All you need to do is to move your mouse to the black pot on right down corner of cell I2, and your cursor will become a black cross, then you pull it all the way to I19. It means to apply the same “function” to all cells of the same column, and Excel will replace other cells in the function (D2 and C2) to other cells accordingly (D3 and C3, D4 and C4, D5 and C5….). Magic! After you applied the function to all cells in column I, column I is the new variable representing the percentage of voters in each county who went to vote in 2020 chose to vote on the Election Day.

Your preview ends here

Eager to read complete document? Join bartleby learn and gain access to the full version

Access to all documents
Unlimited textbook solutions
24/7 expert homework help