Description

SOCI 2013, Assignment #3

Value: 25% (Marked out of 100%)

Due: April 4 at 4:30 - For this assignment you are to work on your own.

All term you have been using Statistics Canada’s Canadian Community Health Survey (CCHS) Data for this survey was collected in 2014. Click here for more information about the survey. The primary objective of the CCHS is to collect information related to health status, health care utilization and health determinants for the Canadian population.

Context

The social determinants of health are the circumstances in which people are born, grow up, live, work and age, and the systems put in place to deal with illness. These circumstances are in turn shaped by a wider set of forces: economics, social policies, and politics. Food security is considered one social determinant of health and the association between illness/disease and food security status is well documented. On an individual level, food insecurity affects both the physical (ie. higher rates of heart disease and chronic conditions like obesity) and emotional health (higher rates of stress and depression) of people and families and is a serious public health problem.  

The research question

Does food security status make a difference on nutritious food consumption and health outcomes?

There are five main components to this assignment. The assignment is a cumulation of all SPSS related tasks that you have completed in labs over the course of the semester. You are required to carry out an analysis on the CCHS data to answer these questions.

The Variables you will use

1. Using SPSS – Provide and Discuss Descriptive Statistics for the above variables.

Produce and show a frequency table for the nominal and ordinal variables. Produce and show all relevant measures of central tendency and dispersion (inserting your SPSS outputs). Describe all relevant output (frequency tables and the measures of central tendency and dispersion). Explain which measure of central tendency is the most useful. For the interval-ratio variable, narrate the standard deviation score and describe the shape of the distribution.

2. Using SPSS – Recode all the nominal and ordinal variables into dichotomous variables (two categories only).

For the food security variable, it can be coded 1 and 2 (but if you made this variable already in class you might have it already as 0 and 1 and that is ok). For the other nominal and ordinal variable that are your dependent variables recode them as ‘dummy variables’ (making two categories only – that are coded 0 and 1 – where 1 will indicate having heart disease, having poor health (collapsing the categories poor and fair as 1, and all the others as not-poor health and making that category 0), and do the same for having poor mental health). Remember to label your variable in the variable view tab of SPSS.

3. Using SPSS – Create Crosstabulations (bivariate tables)

a.       Using your independent variable, create three crosstabulations in SPSS with each of your new recoded variables (heart disease, perceived health, and perceived mental health). Show me the SPSS crosstabulation outputs by inserting them into the assignment. Tip – always put the independent variable in the columns. Remember to ask for column percentages. You can also ask for frequencies not to be shown.

b.      Create a well formatted bivariate table in word for each of your three outputs. Basically, I just want you to use the same figure in the SPSS outputs but show me that you can make proper tables in word with the same information.

c.       Describe each of your three tables using sentences. Discuss the percentage differences of the dependent variable by food security status. What are the key points that someone should know about these relationships?

4. Using SPSS – Confidence intervals

Ask SPSS to calculate a 95% confidence interval for your ratio variables (BMI, and Daily consumption of fruits and vegetables). Paste the outputs into your assignment. Explain what the confidence intervals tells us about Canadian’s BMI and Daily fruit and vegetable intake.

5. Using SPSS – T-tests for differences between means and proportions