STATA Homework I. Vilim Mance, Matej Mikašinović-Komšo Students (individually or in pairs) will prepare a short project proposal (approximately 900-1,800 chars including spaces). The proposal should contain short description of the research subject, clear definition of the main research question, 2-3 hypotheses and brief information about the intended data source and its availability. Religion is an important and always relevant aspect of society, even if people are becoming more non-religious, since it has always prescribed positive values, which, in theory, should be compatible with democracies. What contemporary democracies face is an ever diminishing voter turnout, as well as a loss of democratic values, even in developed countries. Therefore, we wonder if being religious can have a positive effect on democracies, in the sense of people being more democratic by having democratic values and participating more in democracies. Our research question is: Are religious people more suited for democracies than non-religious people? By this, we mean that religious people possess more democratic values than non-religious people. In order to answer our research question, we propose the following hypotheses: 1) Religious people are more tolerant than non-religious people to different people. 2) Religious people are more involved in politics (voting, participating in politics) than non-religious people. 3) Religious people want to do more good for society than non-religious people. 4) Religious people want more equality than non-religious people. We consider these four values (tolerance, participation, altruism, equality) to be of the utmost importance for the democratic quality, and therefore, relevant when attempting to understand if a group has democratic values. The data which we will be analysing in order to test our hypotheses and answer our question is the newest data for 2010-2014 from World Values Survey – WVS Wave 6. This data is available to everyone, and it is collected from states around the world, with the intention of monitoring and analysing the various changes of values in political and social life throughout the years. Students (individually or in pairs) will perform the simple descriptive analysis of the selected data source (concerning the research questions and hypotheses defined in the 1^st assignment). The results should be presented in the 3,600-5,400 chars document with relevant tables and graphs. Tables should be formatted according to usual scientific standard (cf. Czech Sociological Review). In order to test our hypotheses, we have conducted research in Stata, and, in order to present our results, we must first briefly define the methodology that was used. The main variable which we used was V147 and V9. I really don’t care about the names of variables, please use common language and explain me, what it means. Due to the complexity of the data, which collected data for each of the 32 countries investigated individually, we have decided to use these two “global variables”, which ignore differences between different religions and countries, in order to create a simplified analysis. The first variable, “Religious Person”, offers the choice between being religious, not being religious, and being an atheist. We consider the first choice to represent those who are religious, while the other two represent those who are not religious. The second variable, “Importance of Religion”, offers the choice between religion being important, somewhat important, not very important and not at all important. The first two are combined, and they represent people who value religion as important, while the last two are combined to represent those people who do not see religion as important. All tables were created via the tabulation command, except tables 7, 8, 9, 10, and 11, where the command bysort was used. Again, I don’t care about the commands, I want to read sociological paper. Table 1. The table (as well as the other tables) are completely incorrect. First, there is some specific format you should use. Second, make a table, don’t copy output from Stata. Third, use percentage as often as possible, no one cares about frequencies. Because if you calculate percentage, you will see there is almost no difference between groups. Table should look like this (percentages are only my estimation): Tolerance and respect Religion is Yes No Total Very important 66 % 34 % 100 % Rather important 66 % 34 % 100 % Not very important 66 % 34 % 100 % Not at all important 66 % 34 % 100 % In order to test our first hypothesis (Religious people are more tolerant than non-religious people to different people), we have operationalized tolerance as a question of who would you like to have as neighbours, and with the method of tabulation, compared it to the degree of the person’s fondness and importance of religion. Table 1 shows that 68.27% of people who value religion in their lives also consider tolerance as an important child quality, which is insignificantly lover than 68.89% of non-religious people who value those qualities as well. No, it doesn’t, the table 2 (!) shows that 9,266 people… Use percentage, frequencies are not important at all Table 2. Table 2 shows that 19.51% of people who value religion in their lives would not like to have people who speak a different language as neighbours, which is higher than 13.81% of non religious people who consider the same. Table 3. Table 3 shows that 21.15% people who value religion in their lives would not want to have people of a different race as neighbours, which is again higher than 14.98% of non religious people who wouldn’t want the same. Table 4. Table 4 shows that 19.96% of people who explicitly said that they were religious would not want to have people of a different race as neighbours which is again higher then 18.19% of not a religious persons and atheists combined. Maybe you could use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogardus_social_distance_scale and make one simple and elegant table Table 5. Regarding our second hypothesis (Religious people are more involved in politics (voting, participating in politics) than non-religious people), table 5 shows that 59.49% of people who consider themselves as religious always vote in local elections, which is higher than the amount of non-religious person and atheists, 52.64%. Table 6. On the national level, in table 6, the numbers remain similar. 62.44% of people who consider themselves as religious always vote in national elections, while that numbers is again lower for non-religious people combined with atheists - 55.53%. Table 7. Sorry, but this table is completely unreadable for me For table 7, we have compared the importance of democracy to religious person with the views of non religious people/atheists. Due to the nature of the variable “importance of democracy”, it was possible to transform it from a nominal one to a continous one for the simplicity and clarity of the measurment. In it. the value 1 means “not important”, while the value 10 means “absolutely important”. Differences between results can be considered irrelevant, as both religious people and non-religious people/atheists show similar sense for importance of democracy, 8.23, 8.27, 8.36 respectively. Table 8. Dtto: I don’t know what the v147 is, use common language J, and what the numbers show? Why are there two lines? Make tables, don’t copy! Table 8 concerns our third hypothesis (Religious people want to do more good for society than non-religious people). The variable used is V74B – Important to help people living nearby, in which the value 1 signifies complete agreement, while the value 6 signifies complete disagreement. The results show that religious people are more prone to helping other people near them that non-religious people, with values 2.26, 2.62 and 2.66 respectively. Yes, these are the only three numbers we are interested into. Put them into table and erase all the other information about the Obs, Weight… Table 9. Table 9 shows how much do people think that it is important to do something for the good of society, where value 1 represents strong agreement, and value 6 means strong disagreement. We can see that religious people agree the most with this statement, showing the value of 2.33, while non religious people and atheist show slightly different values: 2.73 and 2.94 respectively. Table 10 Table 10 concerns our last hypothesis (Religious people want more equality than non-religious people). Here, our variable “Women have the same rights as men” was also transformed from nominal to continous, for the sake of clearer and easier meassuring, were 1 means “absolutely disagree” and 10 means “absolutely agree”. By looking at our results we can see a noticable difference, as religious people tend to disagree more than non religious people/atheists with that statement, with their values being 7.76, 8, and 8.45 respectively. Table 11. In table 11, on the question: “Is homosexuality justifiable?” all three groups show tendency to pick lower value answers: Atheist go barely over the middle value, 5.18, non religious people produce the value of 3.99, while religious people show the least amount of tolerance for homosexuality, and display the value of 2.81. To conclude, only two of our four hypotheses has proven correct: that religious people are more involved in politics, and that they want to do more good for society. Research has proven that religious people are less tolerant and less egalitarian than non religious people, but do want to take more active part in democracy and its mechanisms, as well as do more good in society. However, further and more detailed analysis of the data used should be done in order to truly conclude if these current assumptions are true. Data which was used can be found at: http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/WVSDocumentationWV6.jsp www.worldvaluesurvey.org (2018) WVS Wave 6 (2010-2014). worldvaluessurvey.org (Accessed on March 8th 2018) Your assignment is statistically correct, but you really need to work on your result presentation. I take three points down 1 for bad table format 2 for the unreadable copy of Stata output with huge amount of non useful information Please correct it into the final paper and everything will be perfect. And remember – you are not talking with Stata, but with people. We people do not know what v123 means, we need the common words, such as “religiosity” or “tolerance rate” or something like that