Assignment

Quantitative research involves the analysis of data. Often there are databases available or government data available for free on the internet. There are also proprietary databases that can provide data as well. For this assignment, you will collect data and begin the analysis of the data. NOTE: save the data collected because you will continue to perform additional analysis of the data as the term progresses. Hint: for collecting data, try the Research and Innovative Technology Administration, Bureau of Transportation Statistics website. You will have to do some searching to find the data. Look around the reference website, the data are there.

For the first module, you need to collect cumulative data for all U.S. major carriers for the time period of January 2006 through December 2012. The data you collect should include monthly load factors, monthly revenue passenger miles, and monthly available seat miles (Domestic flights only).

Once you have collected the data, clean the data as necessary (i.e. sometimes monthly data will include a total for each year in the data set). If you keep the annual total in the data set it could skew some of your results. Also, remember the question asks for domestic data only. For the period in question calculate the following summary statistics for each data item collected:

- Mean
- Median
- Mode
- Standard Deviation
- Variance
- Minimum and maximum

In addition to data for all U.S. carriers collect the same data of a single U.S. airline, clean the data, and calculate the same summary statistics for the particular airline you selected.

Create a scatter plot for all of the US airline data with revenue passenger miles on the y-axis and load factor on the x-axis. Do the same for the individual airline you have selected. Make sure your scatter plot includes a title of the plot, labels the x and y-axis with appropriate titles, and uses appropriate scales for each axis (refer to your textbooks for examples).

After completing the above items, prepare a brief (three to four paragraph) discussion of the summary statistics, perceived relation between load factor and revenue passenger miles (if any), how your selected airline appears to be performing relative to the industry, and any other information you can glean from the data collected. Your write-up should also include a brief discussion identifying where the data was obtained from. Ensure sources are cited and formatted in accordance with current APA format.

This assignment is intended to get you to start thinking about what your data may or may not be telling you. Certainly, this early in the term we have not discussed the tools necessary to draw strong inferences. However, there are items which may appear to be apparent that can be discussed.

Be sure to include summary tables of summary statistics, the scatterplots, and the excel spreadsheet with the data in addition to the brief write-up.