Congress, Obama Toil to Help Jobless Get Health Care

236 Students: Notice how this story emphasizes the importance of cost considerations in policy debates.

The twin ideas, preliminarily estimated to cost $39 billion through the end of next year, would represent sharp departures in two long-standing programs and already are sparking debate along the ideological continuum on Capitol Hill and beyond. In Congress, several key Democratic House members and senators have endorsed the broad contours, while a few Republicans, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) have signaled that they are wary. Debate, however, will not solidify until lawmakers learn more precisely how much the proposals would cost and how many people they might help.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/16/AR2009011603872.html?hpid=topnews

Is Mike Ditka a Policy Entrepreneur?

235 Students: Listen to the story below and consider: Does Mike Ditka qualify as a policy entrepreneur?

Saturday, January 17th, 2009 | NPR's Only A Game

What happens to NFL players once they’ve retired and are hit hard by medical and financial issues? Former player and Chicago Bears head coach Mike Ditka assists these players with his non-profit organization, Gridiron Greats. Bobbie O’Brien catches up with the group in Tampa as it plans for several fund-raising events leading up to the Super Bowl.

Advantage Obama: Dems in control

230 Students: Where does the below story fit into our framework for Elections and Political Parties: party in the electorate, party in government, or party organization?

Barack Obama is likely to spend the next four years with one big advantage over his recent predecessors—a first term in the White House with his party in uninterrupted control of both the House and the Senate.

It’s an advantage no president has enjoyed since Jimmy Carter, and one that would offer Obama a unique opportunity to carry out his agenda.

In the House, where Democrats currently enjoy a 79-seat advantage, to regain control the GOP would need to pick up at least 40 seats, a result that has occurred just four times since 1950—and would significantly surpass the Democratic routs in 2006 and 2008.

Advantage Obama: Dems in control - Charles Mahtesian - Politico.com

Factor Analysis Primer

A colleague recommended this online primer on factor analysis, which uses international relations as its case study.

clipped from www.hawaii.edu ANALYSIS By way of orientation, the first section of this paper will present a brief conceptual review of factor analysis. In the second section the scientific context of the method will be discussed. The major uses of factor analysis will be listed and its relation to induction and deduction, description and inference, causation and explanation, and classification and theory will be considered. To aid understanding, the third section will outline the geometrical and algebraic factor models, and the fourth section will define the factor matrices and their elements--the vehicles for presenting factor results. Since comprehending factor rotation is important for interpreting the findings, the fifth and final section is devoted to clarifying its significance.

Survey design tips -- detailed yet readable

There's a fairly detailed, yet quite readable tutorial giving survey design tips here. A sample:

If you want only one answer from each person, ensure that the options are mutually exclusive. For example:

In which of the following do you live?
A house
An apartment
The suburbs

This question ignores the possibility of someone living in a house or an apartment in the suburbs.

And there's this:

Make sure you include all the relevant alternatives as answer choices. Leaving out a choice can give misleading results. For example, a number of recent polls that ask Americans if they support the death penalty "Yes" or "No" have found 70-75% of the respondents choosing �Yes.� Polls that offer the choice between the death penalty and life in prison without the possibility of parole show support for the death penalty at about 50-60%. Polls that offer the alternatives of the death penalty or life in prison without the possibility of parole, with the inmates working in prison to pay restitution to their victims’ families have found support for the death penalty closer to 30%.

(Via All This ChittahChattah)

Convert string variables to numeric using SPSS syntax

I like to do everything in SPSS syntax so my entire analysis is replicable from data entry to statistical operations. After strapping on my hip waders and stepping ever so gingerly into the muck that is the SPSS "help" files, I finally figured out how to convert string variables to numeric when, as it is wont to do, SPSS imports some Excel fields as strings and some as numeric, with no obvious reason why.

The command is:

RECODE oldvar (CONVERT) INTO newvar .

Note that "newvar" has to be just that; you have to use a new variable name. Otherwise, you get this error:

>Error # 4686 in column 28. Text: hccc
>On the RECODE command, an attempt has been made to assign a numeric value
>to a string variable which is named after the keyword INTO.
>This command not executed.

If you're really fond of your original variable names, you could drop those variables and then do this:

RECODE newvar (ELSE=COPY) INTO oldvar.

Brief Big 5 scale, musical preferences scale

Some folks have a 10-item version of the Big 5 personality scale online that has been cross-validated, published, and translated into a number of languages. Impressive stuff. They're also the authors of STOMP, the Short Test of Music Preferences.

The instruments and a nice collection of supporting material are here.