Let’s elaborate on this by accounting for a potential confounder

Let’s elaborate on this by accounting for a potential confounder. Some have argued that race is critical to understanding school discipline. They suggest that low parent education and suspension are both correlated with a parent/respondent’s race. Therefore, race may be a confounder in this relationship, raising the possibility that education doesn’t matter after all. We can control for the effect of race by constructing a layered cross-tab, which will look at the relationship between parent education and school suspension in whites and blacks separately.

1. Go back to the cross-tab menu. This time, add the variable white to the “layer” field.

 2. The result here will be a bit daunting at first glance, but what you are looking for is whether the pattern you found in Exercise 2 is present in the nonwhite subgroup and the white subgroup. If the effect is not present for one group, you have a partial confounder, where the relationship between the two variables is present only for certain groups. If the relationship goes away when you account for this new variable, you have found a confounder, and the original relationship might have been spurious.

 3. In this case, is race not a confounder, a partial confounder, or a total confounder?

 4. Does having parents with low education influence the risk of suspension for whites? For blacks? What does this tell us about our society and how punishment is distributed in schools?

 5. Based on the measures in this dataset, what type of design do you think this study is using—longitudinal or cross sectional? What are the strengths and limitations of this approach? Test your understanding of the chapter content. Take the practice quiz.