The TA will be Mr. Yuan Li. His office is ar Room 2116 at Watkins Hall and can be contacted at yli@wizard.ucr.edu .

Lab hours:
Group 1. 11:10-12:00
Group 2. 02:10-03:00
Group 3. 03:10-04:00
All labs are on Tuesday at Sproul Hall 2225.

Office hours:
Group 1. 09:00-10:00
Group 2. 10:00-11:00
Group 3. 11:00-12:00
All office hours are on Friday.

Meeting Time and Places are: 12:40 - 2:00pm, Tuesday/Thursday. Room: Watkins 1101

Readings: lecture notes, web pages, "help" and "tutorials" systems for Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, FrontPage and SPSS and the following elective readings:

William G. Jacoby 1991 Data Theory and Dimensional Analysis. Newbury
Park, CA: Sage

Linda B. Bourgue & Virginia A. Clark 1992 Processing Data: The Survey Example. Newbury Park, CA: Sage

Glen H. Elder Jr., Eliza K. Paralko and Elizabeth C. Clipp 1993 Working
with Archival Data: Studying Lives. Newbury Park, CA: Sage

Computer stuff: 

It is the best that you have your own computer. If so, you should have PowerPoint, FrontPage and SPSS installed in your computer. 

If you do not own a PC, you should plan to spend a good bit of time in campus computer laboratories. All of the software that we will be using is installed on all the computers in Sproul 2225 (where discussion sections will be held), and on most of the computers in Watkins Hall.

Datasets:

The General Social Survey (GSS 1972-2000) and the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) datasets are recommended for this course. They are located in:

http://www.umich.edu/~nes/cses/cses.htm

http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/GSS/

If you wish to use other datasets for this class, please consult with our TA.

Assignments and grades: Your grade for this course will be determined by your work on:

Homework assignments - 70%  (54% for the nine assignments and 16% for the research presentation)

Final examination - 30% 

On assignments, the quality of presentation matters as in the real world. In other words, appearance, organization as well as content will be taken into consideration in assigning grades. The final will be held on 11:30 - 2:30pm of Dec. 14 (Friday). It will be an open book & in class examination.

About your research, you will only need to complete a presentation for this course. A complete research paper is NOT required. But, you are encouraged to write a complete paper. If you are using GSS data, we do encourage you write a research paper and submit your paper to the GSS Student Paper Competition.

Course objectives: 

Sociology 109 does not have any formal pre-requisites. However, many of the ideas will be easier to grasp if you have taken an introduction to sociology (like our Sociology 1) and an introduction to social science methodology (like our Sociology 110A).  Sociology 109 is not required for the B.A. major in Sociology, Social Relations, and related majors. It is required for the B.S. major. If you have any questions about Sociology 109, and how it fits with your academic plans, please contact the undergraduate advisor in the Department of Sociology. The goal of this course is to help you to:

1) Understand the research process and get familiar with data centers and data achieves

2) Understand the basics of data acquisition, data management, data mining and data modeling

3) Learn to use a few software tools including SPSS, PowerPoint and FrontPage

4) Learn some data processing skills

5) Establish a systematic knowledge of data processing

6) Learn to produce knowledge from your data processing work

Course policies:

Examinations and assignments must be turned in at the regular due date. Work will be accepted late only if a prior approval has been given by the instructor or T.A. In the case of extraordinary circumstances, you may discuss possible exceptions to this policy with the instructor.

You are encouraged to cooperate, and to help each other in doing homework assignments. But, you must turn in your own work. You should not have someone else do the work for you. Plagiarism results in automatic failure of this course (as well as disciplinary action by the campus administration).

You are not allowed to cooperate on examinations. Actually, this will be regarded as cheating, and results in automatic failure of the course.

Assignments may be submitted by emails. If you do so, make sure that you get a return message from the teaching assistant that confirms the assignment was received.