Final Essay Quantitative Research Methods Security Studies
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Course
Quantitative Research Methods (8912302Y)
Institution
Universiteit Leiden (UL)
Final Assignment for the Quantitative Research Methods of Security Studies. SPSS assignment with the relationship between political preference and perception of global warming as the topic. Graded with an 8.8
This research was guided by the following question: to what extent is there a relationship between
one’s political preference and their perception of global warming as a threat whilst controlling age,
gender and education?
As independent variable, political preference was chosen. This variable was measured by asking
respondents where they would place themselves on a scale from 1 to 7 in the political spectrum (value
1 being extremely right-winged and value 7 being extremely left-winged). The responses were later
categorized into three main types: right-winged (value 1-3), neutral (value 4), and left-winged (value
5-7). The dependent variable is the perception of global warming as a threat. For this variable,
multiple questions were set and later merged together. The respondents were asked, on a scale from 1
to 7, how worried they are regarding global warming, how important they find the phenomenon and
how urgent new measures should be put into place to stop the phenomenon (value one being not
worried/important at all and value 7 being extremely worried/important). The results of these three
items were merged into the main variable of threat perception of global warming average. Before
doing that, a Cronbach’s alpha was calculated to determine the internal consistency reliability of the
three variables concerning global warming.
The alternative hypothesis for this study is that political preference predicts threat perception of global
warming to a certain extent, in the sense that the more left-winged a respondent is, the higher their
threat perception is. The null hypothesis, in this case, is that there is no significant relationship
between political preference and threat perception of global warming.
Table 1. Case processing summary and
reliability statistics
Valid cases N = 233 92,5%
Excluded cases N = 19 7.5%
Total N = 252 100%
Cronbach’s alpha N=3 1
α = .843
The data was collected by distributing an online survey (made with Qualtrics) to the researchers'
acquaintances, friends and family. This use of convenience sampling was chosen because of time
restraints and the availability of the respondents. The method of snowball sampling was also applied
as the respondents were asked to distribute the survey themselves as well. When analysing the data, a
total of 252 responses had been recorded. Of the total 252 cases, 233 were counted as valid.
In order to analyse the data, a bivariate analysis, as well as a multivariate analysis, was conducted. For
the bivariate analysis, Spearman’s rank-order analysis was chosen as the dependent variable is a scale
1
Variables gwimportant, worriedfotpgw and measuregw included
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