# Analysing questionnaire data

I want to test if there is a rivalry among two siblings in a family. I have 15 questions in my study and I let my 100 respondents ( distributed equally to two siblings) ranked them 1 to 15.

How should I analyse this data?

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please clarify your question - it is not clear that you need a 'treatment' to answer your question. can you provide a list or some examples of the questions in the survey? Do you plan to have 100 individuals, 50 sibling pairs, or something else? – David Jan 11 '11 at 1:21
Jealousy____ Competition for parents' attention____ Difference in terms of gender____ These are sample choices in the questionnaire. They have to rank them from 1 to 15. 1 being the top and 15 as the least., I have 50 pairs of siblings as my respondents, How can I detect if there is really a rivalry between siblings, what will be my statistical treatment on these?, Thanks David for your response, I'll be waiting for your next post – noli macnoli Jan 11 '11 at 5:20
it is still not clear what your questions are, and I think that you are getting your predictors and responses confused. For example, 'difference in terms of gender' would most commonly be used as a predictor, since 'sex' can be assumed to be binary (male or female) whereas 'gender' can have more nuanced meaning; to evaluate "how different is your gender" as a response on a scale of 1 to 15 would require a clear definition of gender. – David Jan 11 '11 at 19:33

In the spirit of an earlier response, you might be interested in David A Kenny's webpage on dyadic analysis, and models for matched pairs (See Agresti, Categorical Data Analysis, Chapter 10, or this nice handout, by C J Anderson). There's also a lot of literature on sib-pair study design, in genetics, epidemiology, and psychometrics.

As you may know, studies on sibling rivalry also suggest that parents' attitude might play a role, but also that generally sibling relationships in early adulthood might be characterized by independent dimensions (warmth, conflict, and rivalry, according to Stocker et al., 1997). So it may be interesting for you to look at what has been done in psychometrics, especially whether your items share some similarity with previous studies or not. The very first hit on Google with siblings rivalry scale statistical analysis was a study on The Effects of Working Mothers on Sibling Rivalry which offers some clues on how to handle such data (although I still think that model for matched pairs are better than the $\chi^2$-based approach used in this study).

References

Stocker, CM, Lanthier, RP, Furman, W (1997). Sibling Relationships in Early Adulthood. Journal of Family Psychology, 11(2), 210-221.

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 +1 A valiant, tactful, and informative attempt to respond to an unanswerable question! – whuber♦ Jan 13 '11 at 23:09

I agree with David that your question needs some better explanation. Perhaps you should start by giving us a snippet of your data set up so that we can see how it's structured. Also indicate what variable links the individuals into sibling groups.

It sounds like you might want to take a look at ranked order logit (type "help rologit") if your data & analysis are something like this:

*****************************! Begin Example

*-----run this code  your Stata do-file editor
clear
inp id ranking   option   x1 x2   male
1   4  1  1 0  0
1   2  2  0 1  0
1   3  3  0 0  0
1   1  4  1 1  0
2   1  1  3 0  0
2   3  2  0 1  0
2   3  3  2 1  0
2   4  4  1 2  0
3   1  1  3 1  1
3   3  2  1 1  1
3   4  4  0 1  1
4   2  1  1 1  1
4   1  2  1 1  1
4   0  3  0 1  1
4   0  4  1 0  1
end

rologit ranking x1 x2 male, group(id)
****************************! End Example


- Eric
eric.a.booth@gmail.com

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