Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Application Of Spectral And Cross-Spectral Analysis To Social Sciences Data, Matthew James Vowels

Theses and Dissertations--Family Sciences

The primary goal of this paper is to demonstrate the application of a relatively esoteric and interdisciplinary technique, called spectral analysis, to dyadic social sciences data. Spectral analysis is an analytical and statistical technique, commonly used in engineering, that allows times series data to be analyzed for the presence of significant regular/periodic fluctuations/oscillations. These periodic fluctuations are reflected in the frequency domain as amplitude or energy peaks at certain frequencies. Furthermore, a Magnitude Squared Coherence analysis may be used to interrogate more than one time series concurrently in order to establish the degree of frequency domain correlation between the two …