POLS 581 Homework Assignment: Analyzing Freedom House Data and Creating Scale Measures - P, Assignments of Political Science

Download POLS 581 Homework Assignment: Analyzing Freedom House Data and Creating Scale Measures - P and more Assignments Political Science in PDF only on Docsity! POLS 581 Homework 2 Fall 2008 1. Freedom House (www.freedomhouse.org) categorizes countries as free (F), partially free (PF), and not free (NF) on the basis of a political rights score and a civil liberties score. Go to the Freedom House web site and find out how they construct their “Freedom House Status”. Open Democracy2004.dta, (1) verify that the Freedom House Status is correctly coded in the data set and (2) make a numeric Freedom House Status variable where the maximum represents “free” states and the minimum represents “not free” states. Turn in output for (3) a summary of the data, (4) the correlation and scatter plot of your Freedom House Status variable and the polity score included in the data set, and (5) the mean, standard deviation, and frequency of polity scores by Freedom House Status. Do any countries stand out as particularly different on the two measures? 2. Working with a cleaned version of World2000.xls, (1) create variables “a country's proportion of global...” for all the variables for which that makes sense. Then (2) create a variable for a country's proportion of urban population. Turn in output for (3) a summary of the data. What country has the highest urban density? What country has the lowest urban density? 3. Open the simulated data scales.dta. Construct a scale measure using x1, x2, x3, x4, and/or x5 that is highly correlated with the unobserved characteristic. Turn in output for your log file of work to include at least (1) a correlation matrix of the x-variables and (2) the correlation between your scale measure and the unobserved characteristic variable.