If you want only one answer from each person, ensure that the options are mutually exclusive. For example:

In which of the following do you live?
A house
An apartment
The suburbs

This question ignores the possibility of someone living in a house or an apartment in the suburbs.

And there’s this:

Make sure you include all the relevant alternatives as answer choices. Leaving out a choice can give misleading results. For example, a number of recent polls that ask Americans if they support the death penalty “Yes” or “No” have found 70-75% of the respondents choosing ”Yes.” Polls that offer the choice between the death penalty and life in prison without the possibility of parole show support for the death penalty at about 50-60%. Polls that offer the alternatives of the death penalty or life in prison without the possibility of parole, with the inmates working in prison to pay restitution to their victims’ families have found support for the death penalty closer to 30%.

(Via All This ChittahChattah)

The command is:

RECODE oldvar (CONVERT) INTO newvar .

Note that “newvar” has to be just that; you have to use a new variable name. Otherwise, you get this error:

>Error # 4686 in column 28. Text: hccc
>On the RECODE command, an attempt has been made to assign a numeric value
>to a string variable which is named after the keyword INTO.
>This command not executed.

If you’re really fond of your original variable names, you could drop those variables and then do this:

RECODE newvar (ELSE=COPY) INTO oldvar.

The instruments and a nice collection of supporting material are here.

There’s a new mind-mapping service called bubbl.us. I’ve taken to using mind-mapping for starting new research projects and papers. It helps me order my thoughts and increase productivity because I dump everything I can possibly think of onto paper before I start nosing around the Internets and getting lost in its series of tubes. Not only does my mind map almost automatically produce good search terms, it gives me organized places to put notes about material I find on JSTOR or Google Scholar.

Kent Brockman reports on Channel Six.

Kent: We’re just about to get our first pictures from inside the spacecraft with “average-naut” Homer Simpson, and we’d like to — aah!
[Camera shows a close-up of an ant floating in front of the three astronauts]
Everyone:Aah!
Kent: Ladies and gentlemen, er, we’ve just lost the picture, but, uh, what we’ve seen speaks for itself. The Corvair spacecraft has been taken over — “conquered”, if you will — by a master race of giant space ants. It’s difficult to tell from this vantage point whether they will consume the captive earth men or merely enslave them. One thing is for certain, there is no stopping them; the ants will soon be here. And I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords. I’d like to remind them that as a trusted TV personality, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground sugar caves.

… an identifiable morphology but, unlike mainstream ideologies, a restricted one. … It does not embrace the full range of questions that the macro-ideologies do, and is limited in its ambitions and scope. Take nationalism, an ideology that concentrates on the exceptional worth of a nation as the shaper of human identity while often emphasizing its superiority over other national entities, and that justifies the demands a nation can make on the conduct of its members. The point is that it does little else (p. 98, emphasis in original).

So under that definition, is the economic nationalism of some Congressional Democrats mentioned in this Slate story a paper-thin ideology?

There is an important distinction to be made between economic populism and economic nationalism. Many of Tuesday’s Democratic victors stressed familiar populist themes: the little guy against the big guy; corporate misbehavior; and tough times faced by working people. Al Gore ran in 2000 as an economic populist and so, implausibly, did John Kerry in 2004. Raising the minimum wage (which Republicans stupidly failed to do before the election) is a classic populist position. Opposing Bush tax cuts for the wealthy is another. But in places where Democrats made their most-impressive inroads this year, one heard a distinctly different message of economic nationalism. Nationalism begins from the populist premise that working people aren’t doing so well. But instead of blaming the rich at home, it focuses its energy on the poor abroad. The leading economic nationalist today is probably Lou Dobbs, who on nights other than Election Night natters on against free trade, outsourcing, globalization, and immigration on CNN.

By the way, if you click through to the ideology book mentioned above and are intrigued, note that Amazon is having a buy three, get one free deal. I was very satisfied with my first Very Short Introduction and have four more (Human Evolution, The Brain, Intelligence, and Psychology) coming Thursday.