What type of calculation to use for IA?

[uglydolphins]

My IA question is this:

Does state gun control law affect violent crime?

I will be using this data http://www.census.go...les/12s0308.pdf to help me

Honestly I am completely lost, my teacher probably did explain this to me but I've missed a week of school since I was pretty sick a few weeks back. All I know is that there should be simple and complicated calculations, what type of calculations is needed for each? I think it is mean, average, and mode for simple calculations? Correct me if I am wrong, but, if someone could guide me in the right direction it would be great.

P.S. This is for math studies.

Edited March 4, 2013 by uglydolphins

[alefal]

There is a number of simple and sophisticated processes you could use for your project.

Descriptive statistics, should as mean, median and standard deviation, could with good results be used on your data.

There are only a few sophisticated processes. Within statistics, you could use the chi-squared test (is variable x and variable y independent?), Pearson's product-moment correlation coefficient (How much does variable x and variable y correlate?) and linear regression. I assume you could use all three on your project. You could also attempt to do some advanced probability, which (according to my teacher, at least) is also considered as a sophisticated process. Given that such and such gun law is enacted, what is the chance for violent crime?

[uglydolphins]

Thanks, that was extremely helpful. However, do you have any idea what my x and y variables would be if I were to use chi square?

[alefal]

My apologies for replying so late, I has been on a MUN conference in New York City the last week, and haven't been able to use the internet too frequently.

It is probably too late to tell you this now, but I think you would be better off with something else than gun control laws, as it is difficult to find a numerical value for laws (unless you have access to an index giving strictness of laws as a value between 1 and 10 for instance). Maybe GDP? Youth criminality? Income?

The x variable would be the index of 'strictness of a gun control law'/GDP/frequency of youth criminality instances/average income of an area/etc. The other variable, the y variable, would be for instance the frequency of gun violence instances.

[uglydolphins]

My apologies for replying so late, I has been on a MUN conference in New York City the last week, and haven't been able to use the internet too frequently.

It is probably too late to tell you this now, but I think you would be better off with something else than gun control laws, as it is difficult to find a numerical value for laws (unless you have access to an index giving strictness of laws as a value between 1 and 10 for instance). Maybe GDP? Youth criminality? Income?

The x variable would be the index of 'strictness of a gun control law'/GDP/frequency of youth criminality instances/average income of an area/etc. The other variable, the y variable, would be for instance the frequency of gun violence instances.

No problem for the late reply, just replying means a great deal to me, I really appreciate it. It isn't too late, I found it extremely helpful so thank you for your reply !