Reference no: EM133383439

Discussion 1: Is classifying states as "red" or "blue" useful for explaining patterns in the American political system? What are some potential problems? What are some benefits? If the "red state/blue state" classification is not useful, what is a better way of explaining variation across states in terms of political attitudes and political participation?

Discussion 2: The Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) is an international consortium of more than 750 academic institutions and research organizations that provides leadership and training in data access, curation, and methods of analysis for the social science research community. ICPSR maintains a data archive of more than 250,000 files of research in the social and behavioral sciences. It hosts 21 specialized collections of data in education, aging, criminal justice, substance abuse, terrorism, and other fields. This data is available at no charge.

For this discussion, you will be summarizing the results of concept that is included in one of the ICPSR datasets. Follow the steps below to find a variable of interest and then discuss your results.

1. Open the ICPSR website
2. Click on Search/Compare Variables under the Find Data tab
3. Search for a variable that measures a concept that is of interest to you (examples: drugs, church attendance, voting, etc.). If the concept that you chose was not included in this survey, then choose another concept. The concept I'm interested in is, How will the legalization of cannabis affect the crime rate in major cities?
4. The results of your search will be in list that includes the way this concept was operationalized (measured) in different surveys.
5. Click on the blue question number to see the results for one of the variables that you think best measures the concept you are using.

Write a summary of the results that includes:

1. the concept you used for your search-
2. a copy of the question that was used to operationalize this concept (How will the legalization of cannabis affect the crime rate in major cities?)
3. the name of the survey from which the variable was taken
4. a summary of the results to the question
5. your thoughts on why, or why not, you think this survey question accurately measures the concept