Help with statistical technique for research

[Ilikecereal]

I am supposed to do an experimental report in my Social Psychology class. I am analyzing the factors affecting the lack of females in engineering and other math-intensive fields. I measured men and women's life interests, life values and attitudes to gender roles in our survey because I think that these factors contribute to the lack of women. Perhaps women are just not that interested in these fields compared to men, perhaps these fields are incompatible with their values in life (for eg. not having to work for extremely long hours) or maybe they weren't as encouraged to go into these fields as their male counterparts. I used a four point scale for my survey. (Not Interested-Very Interested and Strongly Agree-Strongly Disagree)

The problem is, I have not studied Statistics or Research Methods yet. I am a completely lost as to how to go about this. Can someone please tell me what statistical technique would be appropriate for this research? Chi-square? Correlation? Other methods? If anyone can just provide a basic outline as to how I would go about analyzing my data, that would be very helpful.

 

[Stephen Tashi]

A basic lesson in the statistical analysis of experiments is that the statistical analysis should be planned before the experiments are completely designed and conducted.

Given it's too late for that, you should decide which of the two main topics in statistics apply. These are 1) Hypothesis Testing and 2) Estimation. What hypotheses do you wish to test? What parameters of the phenomenon do you wish to estimate?