Assignment 1-3
A little background: I’m using the Outlook on Life Surveys dataset and I’m interested in the relation between union membership and political participation (background here). The third assignment is similar to the second one, only we’re required to do some data management before outputting the data. Therefore, I’ll submit an adapted version of the programme and blogpost of the previous assignment.
The output’s supposed to be ‘interpretable (i.e. organized and labeled)’. For those who are logged in to the course website, I refer to this forum post disucssing how I interpreted this requirement.
In terms of data management, I’ll perform the following steps: first recode ‘refused’ to NaN
(not required for the first variable PPWORK, because it has no missing values) and recode the answers to labels (e.g. 1 = ‘Yes’). Next, I’ll create a secondary variable which indicates whether respondents have engaged in any of the four types of political participation discussed below.
The programme itself is posted here. Below I’ll discuss some of the output. For the sake of convenience, I’ll only show percentages (the raw counts can be obtained by running the programme). First, the current employment status of respondents.
PPWORK: Current Employment Status
Percentage
Not working - retired 21.011334
Not working - on temporary layoff from a job 1.264167
Not working - looking for work 10.854403
Not working - disabled 8.456844
Not working - other 6.451613
Working - self-employed 6.190061
Working - as a paid employee 45.771578
dtype: float64
One of the variables I’m interested in, is union membership. My understanding of the American situation is that union membership is often dependent on whether your workplace is organised (by contrast, in the Netherlands it’s not uncommon for unemployed or retired people to be union members). For that reason, it makes sense to look specifically at respondents who are working as paid employees. (The fact that union membership is measured at the household level complicates matters but that doesn’t change my preference to focus on paid employees.)
1,050 respondents (46%) are paid employees. This would seem to be a sufficiently large group for the purposes of the analyses I plan to do. In the programme, I created at subset of respondents who indicated they are working as paid employees. All output below is based on this subset.
Next, let’s take a look at the numbers for the variable on union membership (as indicated, at the household level).
W1_P8: Does anyone in your household currently belong to a union?
Percentage
NaN 1.142857
No 78.380952
Yes 20.476190
dtype: float64
Within the subset of respondents with paid employment, little over 20% indicate that at least one person in their household is a union member. This compares to a union density of 11.1% among wage and salary workers in the US according to the Bureau of Labour Statistics.
Some of that difference can be explained by the fact that the 20% figure will include some respondents who aren’t union members themselves but who have someone in their household who is. On the other hand, the BLS is a bit more persistent in assessing union membership, and would likely classify some people as union members who wouldn’t be classified as such in the OOL surveys.[1] All in all, I’m inclined to say the 20% figure in the OOL surveys is higher than expected and that there is a possiblity that the survey sample is in some way biased towards union members.
And finally the political participation measures.
W1_L4_A: [Contacted a public official or agency ] Please indicate if you have done any of the following activities in the last 2 years.
Percentage
NaN 2.190476
No 74.095238
Yes 23.714286
dtype: float64
W1_L4_B: [Attended a protest meeting or demonstration ] Please indicate if you have done any of the following activites in the last 2 years.
Percentage
NaN 2.190476
No 90.571429
Yes 7.238095
dtype: float64
W1_L4_C: [Taken part in a neighborhood march ] Please indicate if you have done any of the following activites in the last 2 years.
Percentage
NaN 2.095238
No 93.047619
Yes 4.857143
dtype: float64
W1_L4_D: [Signed a petition in support of something or against something ] Please indicate if you have done any of the following activites in the last 2 years.
Percentage
NaN 2.380952
No 58.190476
Yes 39.428571
dtype: float64
Respondents are more likely to have signed a petition or contacted an offical than to have hit the streets. This is as expected.
I’ve created a secondary variable indicating whether respondents have participated in any of the discussed forms of political participation. Respondents who have answered ‘Yes’ to any of the four political participation questions will be assigned a value ‘Yes’; those who have answered ‘No’ to all four questions will be assigned a value ‘No’ and those who have not answered ‘Yes’ to any of the questions but who have refused to answer at least one of the questions will be treated as missing.
ANY: Respondent has engaged in any of the four forms of political participation in the last 2 years
Percentage
NaN 2.190476
No 50.952381
Yes 46.857143
dtype: float64
The frequency table shows that almost half the respondents have engaged in any of the discussed forms of political participation in the last 2 years.
Finally a word on missing values. For all variables considered here, the percentage ‘refused’ is below 2.5%. This would seem sufficiently low not to expect any problems arising from this.
PS One of the students who reviewed my first assigment suggested I include ‘canvassing’ as a measure of political participation, which seems to make sense. Unfortunately the dataset doesn’t seem to include this aspect, but there are variables on other types of political participation that I may add in the future.
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«Employed wage and salary workers are classified as union members if they answer “yes” to the following question: On this job, are you a member of a labor union or of an employee association similar to a union? If the response is “no” to that question, then the interviewer asks a second question: On this job, are you covered by a union or employee association contract? If the response is “yes,” then these persons, along with those who responded “yes” to being union members, are classified as represented by a union. If the response is “no” to both the first and second questions, then they are classified as nonunion.» ↩