Guidelines for the Data Analysis Paper

1. Introduction - In this section of the paper you should present your research question. What is it you are seeking to explain and why?
   
2. Data and Hypotheses - In this section of the paper you should present your hypothesis (or hypotheses, if you have more than one... but you are only required to do one)
   
   
3. Analysis - This is the section of the paper where you will present and discuss your statistical analyses. IMPORTANT: You MUST present your tables in the proper format. Do NOT simply copy and paste the output from SPSS into your paper. Do NOT use the variable and category names given to you in the dataset (e.g. EDUCAT or WHO VOTE?). Label your tables with the names of your concepts and their categories. The idea is that someone reading your paper who doesn't have SPSS or these data sets will be able to look at your table and know what you are talking about. Failure to do this will result in a loss of points.
   
   If it is appropriate to use regression instead of cross-tabulation, you should present your results in the following manner:

   TITLE (something like, "Explanations of Student Performance")
   Independent Variables	b	BETA
   name of first I.V.	b for first I.V.* [put an asterisk or asterisks to denote statistical significance]	BETA for first I.V.
   name of second I.V.	b for second I.V.* [put an asterisk or asterisks to denote statistical significance]	BETA for second I.V.

   
   R² = whatever your R² is.
   N = number of cases
   [also, include a key here for the asterisks that you will use to denote statistical significance, something like "* p < .05" and/or "** p < .01"]
   
   
4. Conclusion - This is where you discuss your results IN TERMS OF YOUR CONCEPTS. In other words, the Analysis section you will be a robot and be interpreting the results in terms of the statistics, but in this section you will be explaining the results in terms of your concepts... in plain English