http://www.web-research-design.net/P593/

For the next homework assignment I would like for your to experiment with programming in Perl. Specifically, I would like you todesign a simple questionnaire (it can be the same one you designed last week) and modify your Perl script to process the data in a more complex fashion. The Perl script should do the following things:

1. Process the data in a novel way (e.g., classifying a person into a category based on his or her responses, creating a composite score[s] based on those responses). (Note: If you use a composite score, please reverse key any items that need to be reversed.)

2. Save the original responses to a text file along with the additional information from item 1 above (e.g., a composite score).

3. Provide customized feedback for your participants. This may include reporting composite scores, classifications, or other kinds of output so long as that output is dependent upon something that the user does. You should use conditional statements (e.g., if(condition){action}) to accomplish this.

4. Read the sample data from the text file and use that sample data to provide your participant with a study summary. That might involve presenting the average composite score for people in the sample, summarizing the number of men vs. women who have participated, or, if you’re feeling creative, using IF statements to summarize the data for men and women separately. Simply summarize one thing; you don't need to summarize each variable for which you've collected data.

5. Finally, I want you to make the script do something creative—something above and beyond what I’ve shown you in class, but something that takes advantage of what we’ve discussed in class. Example: You could combine the FOREACH and IF commands to tabulate the self-esteem scores for men and women separately. (Please keep in mind that this is an example. If you actually do this, I’ll consider it quite uncreative.)