Objectives

In this assignment you are expected to develop a business report that will be presented to a senior manager of a law firm. The report should be informative but concise and follows a specific structure that allows the document to be easily read and understood. For this purpose please ensure that you have studied supplementary material about the academic report writing available on e-tivity 5.4 before you start your assignment. This assignmeis worth 20% of your final mark.

This assignment provides students with opportunity to:

- combine statistical analysis and report writing skills to prepare a concise, non-technical business report,
- draw a random sample to complete statistical analysis,
- develop and enhance computing skills, specifically the use of the built-in functions in MS Excel and MS Word,
- apply statistical techniques to a data set, and
- reinforce taught concepts including descriptive statistics, sampling and estimation, hypothesis testing, correlation and regression.

Presentation of a business report

You are going to help Jason in developing a report that addresses Margaret's concerns. She wants to know whether the initiatives she implemented have been beneficial. Since Margaret is not very familiar with statistical terms, try to not just quote statistics or analysis results, but explain what they mean. In general, do not include formulae, calculations, definitions of statistical terms or discussions on how graphs are constructed in the report. Where appropriate these may be included in the appendices. Follow the Harvard Style Guide (available on e-tivity 5.4) for all in text references, reference lists and bibliographies.

It is important that the values which have been calculated are correctly analysed, discussed and interpreted. The written description of the main features of the tables and graphs should be presented. The emphasis will be on interpretation and analysis, not just the computation of statistics and construction of graphs. The assessment should be in one single Microsoft Word compatible document and should be written in 12 point font. It is expected that all work submitted, will have been edited for spelling, grammar and clarity.

Tasks

Most of your statistical calculations should be carried out using Excel only and you will use Microsoft Word and Excel to complete this assignment.

1. Select a Random Sample

Select a random sample of size 100 from the given 810 cases (remember that 810 cases constitute the population of interest and you are not allowed to calculate any parameters such as mean and standard deviation). You will use this sample data to complete tasks 2 to 5.

2. Descriptive Statistics

Use appropriate data summary methods to describe the (data name) data in your sample using the (number of) variables. Use an appropriate graphical and/or summary statistical technique, chosen according to the type of variable. These techniques will be chosen from:

Tabular Techniques: e.g. Frequency tables and Grouped (joint) frequency tables.

Graphical Techniques: e.g. Pie chart, Bar graph, Histogram (avoid three dimensional graphs).

Summary Statistics: e.g. Mode, Median, Mean, Standard Deviation, Range, Coefficient of Variation and Interquartile Range.

You will need to choose the most appropriate technique(s) for each variable being analysed. Less appropriate/inappropriate techniques will receive fewer/no marks.

There are seven variables all together to be analysed. For paired variables (before and after), only analyse before variables.

For a nominal or an ordinal (discrete) variable draw a graph and present a frequency table in percentages.

For a ratio or an interval variable (continuous) draw a graph and a summary statistics table.

Try to use variation in drawing graphs e.g. pie chart/ bar chart or histogram as much as possible. Do not draw two different graphs for the same variable.

3. Confidence intervals

Estimate the following quantities, using 95% confidence intervals. Explain the meaning of your confidence intervals.

i. The average age of employees.
ii. The average total time spend on social media.

Compare both intervals with their respective true means.

4. Hypothesis Testing

Margaret has some assumptions about the impact of time spent on social media on employees' wellbeing and wants to check their validity. She also wants to know whether her initiatives have been successful or not. Investigate these contentions by carrying out appropriate hypothesis tests.
i. It is often felt that female employees spend more time on average on social media than male employees do.
ii. After implementation of the new initiatives, employees' stress levels have decreased.
iii. After implementation of the new initiatives, employees feel they receive more support from their peers.

Only report a non-technical explanation of your methodology and your findings in the main section of the report. The computations and output should be placed in an appendix.

5. Correlation and Regression

In this section, first, Jason intends to investigate the relationship between the time spent on social media and employees' productivity. As the second test, he investigates the relationship between the time spent on social media and employees' job satisfaction. For these tests use before data.

Use these variables to develop two regression models and make sure to provide full discussions on each test. You discussions for each test should include:

- a scattergram and full interpretation
- an estimate of the linear regression model
- the coefficients of correlation and determination
- a test of the hypothesis that there is no linear relationship between dependent and independent variables.

Assignment structure:

Presentation

Presentation is an important feature of a business report. The guide to presentation that follows includes an Executive summary, Introduction, Analysis and Appendices (please follow the instructions given in e-tivity 5.4). Your assignment should contain the following sections:

Executive summary
This is your first page and not to be included in the page count. Executive summary should be a combined form of Introduction and Conclusions.
- Report only the highlights of the findings
- Entice an Executive to read on
- Essentially a lively summary of the main conclusions
- No longer than one page since not counted in the page count, must be on a separate page from the rest of the report.

Introduction

This should contain information about what we expect to read in the project.

- State the purpose of the report, e.g. what you will discuss in the report
- Outline the contents of the report
- Provide a brief description of the methodology

- Describe the source of the data and state its location in the report.

Attachment:- Assignment.rar