Chapter Eight: Multivariate Analysis Crosstabs Revisited Simple crosstabs, which examine the influence of one variable on another, should be only the first step in the analysis of social science data (refer to Chapter Five). It is fun to hypothesize that the more conservative a person's political orientation the more likely they are to oppose abortion, then run the crosstabs, and then conclude you were right. However, this one step method of hypothesis testing is very limited. What if all the Republicans in your sample are religiously conservative and all the Democrats are atheists? Is it the political party that best explains your findings, or is it religious orientation? Or what if the political conservatives as a group are much older than the liberals, would age then be the real causal factor? Or is it some combination among all of these variables that explains the varying opinions of your respondents?
In Exercise 3 of Chapter Five, we wondered if TRUST is related to RACE. Using TRUST as the dependent variable and RACE as the independent, here is the table from Chapter 5 (Figure 8-1):

Figure 8-1
At first glance, RACE differences appear to be very important (overall, 58% of those surveyed said people cannot be trusted, but the epsilon statistic -- the difference between the highest and lowest percentage -- is 22). Also note that few Respondents said “Depends” – most had a definite opinion here.
Let’s do some recoding: RACE should be recoded into a different variable called RACER (Race Recoded). Whites and Blacks will stay the same, but Other is eliminated by recoding it as missing (see Figures 8-2 and 8-3). Review Chapter 3 if you need to refresh your memory on how to recode.

Figure 8-2 |
Figure 8-3 |
Let’s also recode TRUST into a different variable called TRUSTR to eliminate the “Depends” category. Don’t forget to create new