Instructions for doing cross sectional data analysis.
In this part you can do county-by-county analysis from the data in the Georgia County Guide and the
Farm Gate Survey. There are six types of analyses you can perform:
1. See the data. This option will let you look at the raw data, just as they appear in the Georgia
County guide. You can select up to 4 variables at a time.
2. Rank Counties, High to Low. Here, you specify one variable and you can see the top counties in that
category.
3. Rank Counties, Low to High. Same as above, but in reverse. You only rank one variable at a time.
4. Calculate Means. This will report the averages, standard deviations, the maximum and minimum values.
You can specify up to four variables, any number of counties you want.
5. Calculate Correlations. Here, you can see the pairwise correlation coefficients, for 2, 3, 4 variables, for any
number of counties you want. If the correlation is close to zero, this means that when one variable
changes, the other variable does not change. If it is close to one, this means that an increase in one variable
is associated with an increase in another variable. A corrleation close to -1.0 has the opposite meaning,
indicating a negative assocition. However, a strong correlation does not imply any causality. In addition,
this option reports the same statistics as option #4 does.
6. Map a Variable. You can generate a map that shows categorical levels for a variable. The category labelled "."
means that data for the county is either missing, or it has a value of zero. You will want to map all
counties usually. Sometimes, you might want to focus on just a few counties. Go ahead. The counties you skip will
not have any colors on the generated map.
Click here to return to the county-by-county analysis
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