Choice of Variables

Abstract

All of our research questions taken together, they span a wide array of life domains, requiring that a large number of covariates be considered in the empirical analyses. For each independent variable, a brief review of the literature will be given along with an introduction to the hypothesized association with the three dependent variables; the specific hypotheses will be explicated in more detail when introducing the respective analysis. Several variables needed to be transformed in order to be able to perform certain statistical methods. In these cases, details will be provided on the distributional characteristics. In general, the descriptive analysis of the variables introduced here will be presented in Part III.