Controlling for Race with SPSS 20

Posted by Justin Blehar on Sep 29, 2012; 10:18pm
URL: http://spssx-discussion.165.s1.nabble.com/Controlling-for-Race-with-SPSS-20-tp5715386.html

Hello All,

Not sure how much detail is needed so I'll give you a quick overall but I'm trying to control for race and am unsure how to best go about this. I know that I can run a partial correlation and control for race using the menu but is this really controlling for race? If not is there a better way? How would I do this for a t-test?

This is a cross sectional design looking at cognition and smoking in a psychiatric population. There are six groups I'm looking at; Never Smokers, Former Smokers, Nonsmokers (includes both never smokers and former smokers), Heavy Smokers, Light Smokers, and Smokers (includes heavy and light smokers). I have 36 scale variables that I want to compare between each of these groups. When I break out the groups by race (just looking at box plots and mean comparisons) there are clearly some large race effects (e.g. parental education, level of functioning, IQ, etc...). I'd like to be able to correct for this in each analysis. I'm running both correlations and t-tests (maybe this isn't the best process?).

If I run a partial correlation and control for race is this really controlling for race?

When running the t-tests how do I control for race?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

V/R

Justin