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Methods
The data came from Statistics Canada’s 2010 General Social Survey (GSS) Time Use Cycle 24. The analyses are based on 1000 randomly selected respondents from the original survey, which is sufficiently large and representative to permit estimates from the total adult population. The survey was conducted by computer assisted telephone interviews and had a response rate of 55.2 percent. The data were weighted to the non-institutionalized population aged 15 and over in the 10 provinces.
The categorical variable used was the region where the respondent lived. The three categories, Ontario, British Columbia, Prairies and Atlantic were recoded as one and labelled as Province outside of Quebec while Quebec remains coded at two. Ontario, British Columbia, Prairies and Atlantic were coded into one category in order to compare Quebec’s sense of belonging to Canada with the rest of Canada’s sense of belonging to Canada. The province of Quebec was selected to be compared to the rest of Canada because Quebec differs in terms of history, culture, language and political system which could make Quebec more likely to have a low sense of belonging to Canada in comparison to the rest of Canada. In addition, the categorical variable was recoded to exclude no opinion because it had no relevance to the study as it did not signify a sense of belonging to Canada. The quantitative variable is the respondent’s sense of belonging to Canada because sense of belonging is a likert variable. A very strong sense of belonging is coded the highest at one while very low sense of belonging is coded the lowest at four. The middle values are coded as somewhat strong sense of belonging and somewhat weak sense of belonging respectively.
To analyze the select...

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...n was unavoidable as the data was already provided and it is not clear whether surveyors took misinterpretation of the question into account. Future research could solve this problem by applying qualitative approach by asking respondent’s what belonging to Canada means to them, allowing the interviewer and analysts to indicate if the respondent is interpreting the question correctly. In addition, Wong and Simon (2010) suggest that the data does not indicate whether the respondents are native Canadian or foreign born which could have an impact on the data. Similarly, even native Canadians who have either moved from Quebec to a province outside of Quebec and vice versa could have impact the data. However, the limitations do not take away from the results as many of the suggested limitations had little effect on the data as the suggested situation are likely uncommon.

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