Summary
Contents
KEY FEATURES: • Designed to be used in a range of 100-level and 200-level courses, including introductory sociology, social problems, and courses that focus on race, class, gender, or sexuality. • Introduces students to basic analytic techniques in the social sciences, such as frequency distributions, cross-tabulations, and comparisons of means. • No software purchase required–all exercises are carried out on the open-access Survey Documentation and Analysis (SDA) website. • Screen captures from the SDA website, and careful step-by-step instructions, are provided to help students with no previous data analysis experience. • Early chapters focus on single categories of difference and inequality; later chapters examine how these factors intersect within the domains of family, education, and work. • Multiple choice questions and open-ended exercises at the end of each chapter test mastery of the material and give students opportunities to extend their analyses to other questions.
An Introduction to Analyzing Inequalities
An Introduction to Analyzing Inequalities
Learning Objectives
By the end of this chapter, you should be able to:
- Explain how statistical research can play a role in documenting and addressing a range of social inequalities.
- Describe the key themes involved in doing “social justice statistics.”
- Describe the major benefits and limitations of using existing survey data in the context of social justice work.
- Explain the difference between correlation and causation.
- Explain the difference between dependent and independent variables.
Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National Prisoner Statistics Program1
United Nations Statistics Division2
US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention5
Federal Reserve Board’s Division of Consumer and Community Affairs’ 2014 Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking6
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations7
Introduction
Consider a social justice ...
