A Researcher Hypothesizes That Individuals Differ in Support for a Balanced

question 32

Multiple Choice

A researcher hypothesizes that individuals differ in support for a balanced budget amendment based upon their partisan affiliation. He controls for education level and finds that highly educated Democrats are twenty-seven points less likely to support a balanced budget amendment than highly educated Republicans, but Democrats with lower education are two points more likely to support a balanced budget than Republicans with lower education. What's going on here?

• A) an additive relationship between education and partisanship
• B) a spurious relationship between education and partisanship
• C) a zero-order relationship between education and partisanship
• D) an interaction between education and partisanship

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Definitions:

Contingency Table

A table used in statistics to display the frequency distribution of variables, helping in analyzing the relationship between different categorical variables.

Frequency of Occurrence

The rate at which a particular event or outcome happens within a specific interval of time or within a given data set.

Chi-square Test for Independence

A statistical method employed to assess if a significant relationship exists between two variables of categorical type.

Degrees of Freedom

The number of independent values or quantities which can be assigned to a statistical distribution, typically defined as the sample size minus the number of parameters estimated.