The first assignment is a practice of using Excel/Calc or SPSS to explore and present univariate and bivariate descriptions of data from the HHS’ Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality’s yearly survey of medical expenditures, the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS). The MEPS site says that these are “the most complete source of data on the cost and use of health care and health insurance coverage.”

This assignment serves to help accustom you to manipulating, exploring, and presenting data. Although it also begins gaining insights buy looking at simple relationships between pairs of variables, the focus is on understanding and presenting simple-but-important univariate descriptives statistics.

1.1.9 2. Exploring Relationships and Testing Hypotheses

Instructions
Data used in assignment
- As an XLSX file
- As a SPSS SAV data file

In the first assignments, we used descriptive statistics, including to compare groups. Next, we test the significance of bivariate relationships, this time using United States cancer statistics made available by the CDC.

1.1.10 3. Exploring Correlations and Partial Correlations

Instructions
Data used in assignment
- As a CSV file
- As a SPSS SAV data file

In the third assignment, we investigate correlations, again using either Excel/Calc or SPSS. This time, though, we explore the Midlife in the United States (MIDUS) study, a national research project examining how psychological, social, and biological factors affect health throughout participants’ adult lives.

1.1.11 4. Writing About and Interpreting Results

Instructions

The product for the final assignment is a complete Results section; what data are analyzed (and thus what analyses are included) is more open ended. Any of the prior data sets can be used, but students can also use their own data, e.g, from projects they’re involved with or even synthetic data resemble those they expect to collect in a future endeavor.