Individual Assignment

Designing a Data Analysis and Presentation Plan

It is now your turn to determine your plan for analysing and presenting the data for your research proposal. You have had the opportunity to examine other researchers' choices for data analysis and presentation, and you have discussed your thoughts about your own project with your classmates. For this Individual Assignment, you will formulate a data collection and analysis plan. Review all previous units' Shared Activities and Individual Assignments in this module to assure that your plan aligns to all components of your research proposal and will enable you to answer your research question.

For this Individual Assignment, draft a plan for data analysis and presentation that aligns with your methodology and methods and will ensure you are able to answer your research question.

To prepare for this Individual Assignment:

- Read the Unit 5 assigned readings (Chapter 10 is optional).

- Review the Units 1-4 Shared Activities and Individual Assignments.

- Draft a data collection and analysis plan for your research proposal.

To complete this Individual Assignment:

Post a draft of a data collection and analysis plan and provide a rationale that addresses the following questions:

- Explain how your plan supports your research question and purpose and how it fits with your methodology and methods. Are there alternative analysis tools or strategies that you considered? If so, explain why you did not include them in your plan.

- What challenges do you anticipate in analysing and interpreting your data, including both practical and ethical considerations? Are there strategies that you can put in place or changes you can make in your plan to mitigate these challenges? What additional knowledge or skills will you need to acquire in order to implement your plan, and how might you acquire these?

- Explain how you envision presenting your data:
o What presentation formats did you consider?
o How did you decide what formats to use? (Explain your reasoning.)
o How can the data presentations be designed to avoid misinterpretation?

Please write 1500 words

Shared Activity

Making Sense of Data

You have most likely disagreed with a colleague, friend or online review about whether a film, television show or event was ‘good' or ‘bad'. Everyone has his or her own unique biases and ways of judging quality, which affect interpretations. When you interpret the findings of your research, you make value judgements and report what you feel is important given your particular context. Examining other researchers' data analyses and interpretations can give you a glimpse into their value judgements and thought processes. Additionally, you may disagree with their interpretations and think of alternative analyses that would have been more appropriate or yielded better outcomes.

In this Shared Activity, you will find a method for displaying data (eg table, graph or diagram) from a published article and critically evaluate its approach. Additionally, you will comment on alternative approaches and recommend improvements on a variety of data display examples. In the second week of the unit, you will continue your work on your research proposal by sharing ideas with your colleagues about how best to approach data analysis and presentation in your own research proposals.

To prepare for this Shared Activity:

- Read the Unit 5 assigned readings (Chapter 10 is optional).

- Identify an example of a management research article, such as one from your critical literature review, and evaluate the methods used to analyse and present the data.

To complete this Shared Activity:

- By approximately Day 4 of Unit 5, post your data display exemplar and present an analysis of its characteristics:

o What analytical strategies and tools were used to analyse the data? Can you suggest alternative strategies and tools? How would analysing the data in a different manner alter the data presentation?

o Critically analyse how the data are summarised. Do you detect any bias in how the data are presented?

- Respond to at least two of your colleagues with additional ideas about the examples they have posted, adding further insights or expanding on their recommendations for alternative ways of displaying or summarising the data in their example.

- Continue this discussion with your colleagues until the end of the unit by commenting on ways of summarising and displaying research results in the clearest and least biased manner possible.

Choosing Data Analysis and Presentation Techniques

Once you have spent some time analysing examples of data analysis and presentation used in management research in Shared Activity 1, turn your attention to planning for your own research. Use this Shared Activity to give and receive feedback on approaches to data analysis and presentation that you and your colleagues may use in your Management Research Project. This Shared Activity will help you complete your Individual Assignment in this unit, in which you will submit a plan for data analysis and presentation.

To complete this Shared Activity:

- By approximately Day 2 of the second week of Unit 5, post a description of your chosen approach to data analysis for your research question, including the following:

o Explain how this data analysis approach will help answer your research question.

o Discuss how this data analysis approach is appropriate for the type of data you will be collecting and how it will ensure the validity and reliability (if appropriate) of your results.

o Identify strategies you might use to present the results of this type of data analysis.

o Identify the challenges you foresee in interpreting and making inferences with this approach to data analysis.

- Continue this discussion until the end of the unit by commenting on the relationship between data collection, data analysis and interpreting and presenting research findings.