Your name:  Ted Goertzel

1.  State a theoretical hypothesis, drawn from your studies in either sociology or criminal justice.  Your hypothesis should be no longer than one paragraph.  It could be one long sentence, or several short stendences.  The sentence(s) should be modeled on the theoretical propositions on pages 9 to 10 of our textbook. Keep in mind that your propositions must be testable using regression analysis with measures found in the Microcase datasets (either the one that came with your text, or the ones in the full version available in the library).  This means they must be interval, ordinal or dichotomous (dummy) variables.
My hypothesis is that people who vote for protest candidates in national elections are alienated from the political system because they believe they and people like them have been treated unfairly.  In this case, I hypothesize that people who voted for Perot in 1996 were dissatisfied with how their lives were going and felt that they had been treated unfairly by government.  They believed that government had treated other groups better than the group to which they belonged.  I further hypothesize that this feeling was more prevalent among white people who were suffering from status inconsistency:  their incomes were lower than they believe they deserved.

2.  List the important concepts in your propositions, and give a definition of each.  For examples, see pages 9 to 10 of our textbook.  You should have at least five and at most ten concepts.

Vote for Perot:  reported that they voted for Perot in 1996
Alienation from society:  the belief that society has not treated oneself and people like oneself well, that things have not gone well for your group, that things are getting worse, because of neglect from those in power.
Alienation from government:   the belief that government officials are not concerned about problems of people like themselves.
Middle Class:  identified themselves as middle class if asked;  had a white collar job;  had some college education
White:  identified themselves as white but not as Hispanic
Middle income:  in the middle 40% or so of the family income distribution
Status inconsistency:  income or occupational status are lower than average for people of their educational level and racial or ethnic group
 

3.  Prepare an Input Path Diagram to illustrate your hypothesis.

 

4.  Prepare to test your proposition by operationalizing your concepts.  This means you must find a measure for each of them.  You should have one dependent variable and as many independent, antecedent and intervening variables as your proposition requires.  Remember that the variables must be appropriate for regression analysis.  You may need to recode them for this purpose.

       Data Set to be used:  1996 National Election Survey
 
 

Type of Variable: IV, DV, Antedecent or Intervening	Variable Name and Number	Level of Measurement
1.Dependent Variable	1.  v409, Who Vote	1.  Nominal, 3 categories, must be recoded as dummy variable
2.Intervening variable	2.  v 513 Treat Equally	2 .  Ordinal, agree neither disagree
3.Independent Variable	3.   v91, Finances	3.  Ordinal, 1 better 2 same  3 worse
4.Intervening	4.  v 229  Welfare spending	4.  Ordinal 1 increased 2 same  3 decreased
5. Independent Variable	5.  v2 race	5   Nominal, must be recoded as dummy variable.
6.  Independent Variable	6.   v348  family income	6.  Ordinal, low, middle high
7.independent variable	7.   v326 Occupational Category	7 . Nominal, must be recoded as dummy
8.  Status Inconsistency	8.   Typology  to be Calculated from Occupation and Income for white respondents only	8.  to be created as ordinal, low - med - hi
9.	9.	9.
10.	10.	10.

5.   Do the regression analyses necessary to test your path model.  Write out all the regression equations here, using the standardized regression coefficients (BETA weights).

     vote for perot =  alienation from government + alienation from society + finances worse

    alienation from government = status deficiency

     alienation from society =  status deficiency
 

6.   Draw your Output Path Diagram here.

7.  Write a paragraph describing your results.  To what extent did they confirm your proposition?

My results did not confirm my hypothesis.  None of my variables were correlated with the Perot vote.  This may be in part because there were only 82 Perot voters in the sample.  The status inconsistency variable did correlate with a belief in cutting welfare spending and that people are not treated equally.  Note that this analysis is only for white respondents, since status inconsistency was computed only for white respondents.  The only variable I could find that was correlated with the Perot vote was opposition to foreign aid.