You are now a full-time researcher for a major social policy research institute. For this major social policy research institute you have received grant funding, have collected your data or are using pre-existing data, and are now ready to begin analyses. Using any data set (if you do not have any data to work with you are more than welcomed to use the PSID “good” data set, but you may also consider using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, the Health and Retirement Study, the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, Fragile Families, or any other pre-existing national probability sample), you are to examine any particular research question(s) of interest. If you use linear regression, make sure that you consider possible mediation and/or moderation. If you use logistic regression, or one of the models mentioned but beyond the scope of the course (path modeling, multilevel modeling), a simpler model is okay.
You have the option to do a policy research report, blog, vlog, op-ed, or podcast. If you do a policy research report, you need to provide a brief introduction that frames and states your research question(s). Describe your data as you would in a methods section, report your analyses as you would in a results section, and provide a discussion of your interpretation and implications of the results. In the methods section you need to explain which modeling technique you are using, why it is appropriate for your research question(s), and present the equation for the model with all variables included in model. Assumptions need to be evaluated but it is not necessary to report everything done. Simply state if any assumptions were violated and what changes were made to the data and/or model in order to account for assumption violations. The results section should report: the descriptive statistics (i.e. N, means/medians/proportions, standard deviations, frequencies, observed ranges, and correlations) of the variables. If you do a policy blog or op-ed, the narrative of the blog or op-ed should refer to data from the research and you will also need submit a methods and results section of the analyses.
You may work in groups of two for this assignment but you must inform the instructor in advance. Given that this assignment is open to many research questions and the use of any data, please talk to the instructor first about what you plan to do. This assignment can be a good opportunity to work on the analyses for a journal article or an on-going research project including for the Data for Equitable Justice Lab. Please feel free to use this assignment as an opportunity to sharpen, strengthen, or simply complete the analyses for your existing on-going work.
