This page briefly illustrates GraphSheet features in an application to data from the 1997 National Election Survey. This survey database includes answers to 66 questions which reveal political and social attitudes of a representative sample of 551 Americans. While the survey was conducted before the Lewinsky scandal unfolded , the opinions expressed in the survey help explain the public's reaction to recent events. Download the database and analyze the facts behind President Clinton's approval ratings, determine what people think of Rush Limbaugh and political figures and government institutions and explore feelings that people have about crime, government, congress and much more. To download, select the download link at the bottom of this page. The following presentation illustrates the kind of visual analysis and data exploration that can be accomplished with GraphSheet. First, a few interesting summary results from the survey: 70% feel that government is run for the benefit of a few big interests. 43% feel that "quite a few" people in government are crooked. 62% trust the media only some of the time or never. 65% trust the government only some of the time or never. 37% were able to name their US House Representative. 25% were able to name both of their US Senators. 28% consider themselves "strong" democrats or "strong" republicans. While 64% approve of Clinton's job performance, only 28% express strong approval feelings. GraphSheet allows users to visually evaluate these and other data in the survey all with mouse clicks on charts. To start a GraphSheet session with this database, download the data file by clicking on the download link at the bottom of this page, read the data into a spreadsheet program, click and drag across the labels and data, use the spreadsheet Edit/Copy menu item to copy the data onto the clipboard, open GraphSheet and select the Edit/Paste menu option to initiate a GraphSheet session. Select the Approval measures Variable group and the Clinton job approval variable and you will see the following screen. Click on each of the three bars to see the statistics associated with each bar in the statistics windows below the bar chart.

The Records column in the statistics window and the % of Total/Recs column reflects respondents answers to the Clinton job approval question. In the screen above, 340 or 63.7% of respondents approve of the job that Clinton is doing as president. GraphSheet makes it easy to evaluate differences in people who approve and disapprove. In reviewing additional survey variables, it is clear that answers to the question "Should people adjust moral behavior to the changing world?" are significantly different for the two groups. Double clicking on the approve bar drills down to the "Approve" group of respondents; selecting the "moral behavior" question from the list of variables reveals that 40 percent of these respondents feel that people should not adjust moral behavior to the times. Repeating this process for the "Disapprove" group reveals that 70% feel that moral behavior should not be modified in light of changes in the world. These results suggest that approval of Clinton's job performance is highly correlated with personal views of moral behavior. One of the more interesting characteristics of this survey is that it asks respondents to assess their feelings with a "Feeling Thermometer" on individuals and institutions with 0 the least desirable and 10 the most desirable. Bill Clinton, senators and congressmen, Trent Lott, Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, Rush Limbaugh , Newt Gingrich, Federal Government, Congress and the Supreme Court are assigned a Feeling Thermometer value. Rush Limbaugh's "Feeling Thermometer" reflects the most polarised public view with nearly 20% of the population offering a zero rating while about the same number responded with a middle-of-the-road rating of 5. Graphsheet can also be used to evaluate differences in views by people in distinct income and other socio-economic categories. For instance selecting the Feeling Thermometer for the federal government and family income as the two chart variables shows a definite decline in "good feelings" as income increases. GraphSheet has many other features to facilitate data exploration such as documentation of user mouse operations on charts. Each time a bar is clicked in the example, an entry is made in the Statistics Window and in a Query Tree Window. The Statistics Window entries return information on database queries and correlate to chart areas with color codes. Similarly, each query operation results in the addition of a color-coded node to the query tree, visually describing the user-defined hierarchical data subset development. Clicking on the query tree node moves the analysis back to that position in the analysis. GraphSheet works with data from spreadsheets, databases, word processing software, text lists, Web downloadable data and more and with any kind of information - sales, revenue, costs, production, customer contact, accounting, survey and many more. With "weighted" survey data, a special feature automatically weights survey data to show population results in the charts and statistics windows. These few slides illustrate how GraphSheet users can: select any combination of variables for chart display, select any subset of displayed data, drill down to any data subset and, freely navigate through the data. Most importantly, no setup is required to take advantage of GraphSheet capabilities - Block the Data and copy it to the clipboard, open GraphSheet and paste the data - GraphSheet does the rest. Download Survey of Political and Social Attitudes Database The Survey of Political and Social Attitudes may be downloaded as a csv (comma-delimited text) file ( click on the download link below and select the File/Save as menu option). To access the data with GraphSheet read the downloaded csv file into a spreadsheet program (Excel, Lotus 123 or Quatro Pro), click-and-drag across the entire data table including the labels at the top of the table, select the spreadsheet Edit/Copy menu command, open GraphSheet and select the Graphsheet Edit/Paste command and the GraphSheet session immediately begins. Download Survey of Political and Social Attitudes Database.

Note for non-GraphSheet database users. We are happy to provide this database to non-GraphSheet users; however, if you want to apply this database with other software you need to accommodate the weighting factors used in this survey data (GraphSheet handles survey weighting automatically). Most survey data (e.g., customer information surveys, association salary surveys, etc) do not use weights; however, some surveys (such as this Survey of Political and Social Attitudes) apply statistically-developed weights to improve the precision of survey results. If you use spreadsheet software to process these data you will need to apply these weights in computations. For instance to compute the average income of people who approve of Clinton's job approval, multiply the response of interest (e.g., income) times the respondent weights, sum across all respondents and then divide by the sum of weights for those respondents. GraphSheet handles these computations and presents total or average results in the charts and statistics windows after these adjustments are automatically completed.

Note for GraphSheet database users. Most survey data (e.g., customer information surveys, association salary surveys, etc) do not use weights; however, some surveys (such as this Survey of Political and Social Attitudes) apply statistically-developed weights to improve the precision of survey results. When you read data into Graphsheet with a variable named Weight, that variable is used to adjust the responses of the survey respondents in a way that improves the accuracy of the survey results. When a variable "Weight" is included, GraphSheet automatically extends the Statistics window to show an additional column entitled Sample Size which shows the actual number of records in the database. The number reported under Total Records is the "weighted" number of records, or in this case survey respondents, in the population. GraphSheet automatically calculates the impacts of weighted survey results to provide population results.

If you are using survey data without weights, GraphSheet will simply report the number of records and will omit the Sample Size column in the Statistics Window.

Home | GraphSheet Software | JA
Order GraphSheet Software