NTRODUCTIONEach chapter in Polit’s (2010) textbook Statistics and Data Analysis for Nursing Research (2nded.) includes exercises that involve analyzing real data collected in a large study of low-incomewomen. The data are stored in three data files: Polit2SetA.sav, Polit2SetB.sav, and

INTRODUCTION
Each chapter in Polit’s (2010) textbook Statistics and Data Analysis for Nursing Research (2nd
ed.) includes exercises that involve analyzing real data collected in a large study of low-income
women. The data are stored in three data files: Polit2SetA.sav, Polit2SetB.sav, and
Polit2SetC.sav.
This Word file (Dataset_Description.doc) provides an overview of the variables in the datasets,
and a brief description of the study that generated these data. The SPSS codebooks (data
dictionaries) for the datasets are available in a separate Word file. The codebook file shows, for
each dataset, detailed information about each variable—for example, for the variable
Race/ethnicity, the codebook shows that the code of 1 signifies Black, not Hispanic, and so on. It
also provides information about the missing values codes that were assigned when legitimate
values were not available. Variables in the Codebook Word file are arranged in the order that
variables appear in the dataset. Variables in this Dataset Description file are arranged more
substantively.
BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY
The data in the three datasets come from a longitudinal study of low-income women in four
urban communities1
. In the original study, extensive information was collected in 1999 (Wave 1)
and 2001 (Wave 2) from about 4,000 women. A major purpose of the study was to understand
the life trajectories of these women and their children during a period of major changes to social
policies affecting poor people in the United States. The sample was randomly selected from
women who, in 1995, were single mothers receiving cash welfare assistance in the four cities.
All data were collected by means of 90-minute in-person interviews in either English or Spanish
in the study participants’ homes. Professional interviewers from a survey research firm, specially
trained for this study, collected the data