Answer

Categorical Data Analysis

The GSS dataset (Mean of Age is 48.27) is used to assess the association between two categorical variables – Gender and belief in legalization of marijuana. This study tests if one’s gender influence their belief on the subject of marijuana legalization. The dependent variable is ‘Should Marijuana Be Legalized’ and the Independent variable is ‘Respondents Sex’.

The data shows that a majority of respondents were Female, as in the bar graph below.

Fig 1: Distribution of respondents’ gender.

Further, the data indicates that a majority of the respondents believed that marijuana should be legalized.

Fig 2: Bar chart of belief towards legalization of marijuana.

These descriptive statistics raise questions on whether females are more inclined towards legalization of marijuana. Therefore, this study delves on the research question – Does gender influence one’s belief on whether marijuana should be legalized?

The hypothesis to test is:

H₀: There is no association between gender and take on marijuana legalization

H₁: There is association between gender and take on marijuana legalization

Chi square test is used to test this hypothesis.

Table 1: Chi Square test table.

Based on the chi square significance p-value = 0.144 > 0.05, we conclude that the null hypothesis is rejected at 95% confidence level.

Further, the table below shows the effect sizes.

Table 2: Table of effects between the variables.

The table shows that both Phi and Cramer’s V are not significant.

The effects are low <0.1, hence the conclusion that there is little, if any, association between gender and take on marijuana legalization.

The consultation is that there is no significant association between the two variables. That is to say, though it seems that one’s gender influences their take on the marijuana legalization subject, the current data does not find enough evidence at 95% confidence level to support this notion.

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