Intermediate Quantitative Methods for Accounting Business Report

Every year, graduates of XYZ University are surveyed to determine their employment status and annual income. This information was published on University website and would be very useful for prospective students in choosing a university course. XYZ University offers undergraduate degrees in Health Science, Commerce, Law and Engineering.

Last year, the survey was sent to all graduates 6 months after their graduation and asked the following questions:

1. With which degree did you graduate?
a. Health Science
b. Commerce
c. Law
d. Engineering

2. What is your current employment status?
a. Completing additional education
b. Employed
c. Unemployed

3. If you are employed, what is your annual income?

XYZABC University sent the questionnaires to its 1,000 graduates, and received 648 responses with the break-down for each discipline in the below table.

The file entitled ACCT5008_2017_s2_BR_datafile.xlxs stores data in columns A, B and C in the following way:

Column A: Undergraduate degree 1 = Health Science
2 = Commerce
3 = Law
4 = Engineering

Column B: Employment status
1 = Completing additional education 2 = Employed
3 = Unemployed

Column C: Graduate annual income if employed (if they are unemployed or completing additional education, it is recorded as N/A)

You, a career consultant working at XYZ University, is asked to submit a report to the Director of XYZ University Career Centre, by addressing the following questions:

a. Are there differences in the employment status among the four groups of graduates?

b. Are there differences in income among the four groups of graduates?

c. Is income of Commerce graduates lower than income of Health Science graduates?

d. Is the proportion of employed graduates in Law discipline different from the proportion of employed graduates in Engineering discipline?

INSTRUCTIONS

The report covers hypothesis tests in Module 5 to Module 8. However, Module 4 which contains data collection and sampling should be discussed in your report.

The report should have the following structure: Introduction, Statistical Analyses (where you perform hypothesis tests for each of the four questions) and Conclusions (where you summarize the findings and discuss the limitations)

Your report should also include technique identification and any underlying assumptions required (with checking for the required assumptions).
o Why do you use a particular technique? Consider the types of data - quantitative, qualitative or ranked? How many samples? Are these samples independent?
o What are the underlying assumptions? Have you checked the assumptions?
- If checking for normal distribution, consider to put up the histogram and discuss the shape.
- If you found it is not normally distributed, keep doing the test with the underlying assumption, but need to discuss this as one of your limitations in the overall conclusion.

The parameter of interests and populations must be clearly defined.

For each of the tests, you need to have a discussion about the significance level of the test (only consider significance level at 1%, 5% and 10%1)
o If the null hypothesis is rejected, what should be the lowest significance level to reject the null?
o If the null hypothesis is not rejected, what should be the highest significance level to accept the null?

Show all the necessary steps and calculations for your tests.
o This is not a computing assignment, manual calculations must be presented for all of the above tests
- Formula and manual calculation should be presented in the report
- The critical values of the tests should be obtained from the Appendix B of the textbook.
- With ANOVA test, you can have SST and SSE figures from Excel (ANOVA test can be obtained from Data\Data Analysis. An example of how to perform ANOVA test in Excel will be discussed in the class).

The rest of ANOVA calculation (MST, MSE, F-stat, rejection region) should be done manually.

o For descriptive statistics (e.g. mean and standard deviation), Excel calculation is acceptable, no need to show the formula, just state the calculated figure.

Please type your report.
o Formulae can be copied from the lecture powerpoint slides.

Consider Appendices for data and other information to support your calculation.

The report (including tables, calculations and histograms) must not exceed 16 pages; marks will be deducted for exceeding the limit. Pages must be correctly numbered throughout.

For each question above, perform separate statistical tests to answer the questions. This assignment should be presented in a professional manner and you need to demonstrate that considerable thought has gone into the analysis of data.

The marking criteria for each of the question should be as follows:
- Technique identification: why should you use a certain technique?
- Define the populations and parameters of interest
- Checking the conditions of the chosen technique: If a certain condition is not met, you keep doing the test as usual but need to discuss the limitation in the Conclusions part
- Following 6 steps in the hypothesis testing procedure
- Decision to reject or accept the null hypothesis must be referred to all 3 significance levels, that is, 1%, 5% and 10%.