STATISTICS ASSIGNMENT:

This written report is a single flowing paper presenting data and outside research explaining the context of the situation. You will also analyze the sampling methods, provide graphs of your given data, explain outliers, and conduct a hypothesis test. Finally, you will make inferences from the results.

This assignment requires a cover page, research questions, report, hypothesis, substantiation,conclusion/recommendations, references, appendix with data or supporting information.

The assignment is broken down into four parts (75 Points Each):

Primary Situation/Data Analysis with Research, Examination of Descriptive Statistics, Examination of Inferential Statistics, and Conclusion/Recommendations.

A cover page, reference page, and appendix are required. The appendix comes at the end of the paper and should include, at a minimum, data from a newspaper/journal article, research study, university/corporate report, or national data set. Put this in Appendix 1. Your cover page must have your name, title of the paper, type of assignment project, course name/number, university name, term of enrollment, and optional picture that represents the study you are conducting. Your reference page must have a minimum of two references outside of the textbook or materials in this class. Other appendices might include graphs or charts from outside sources, although some of these should be in the body of the paper in order to present your findings so that the reader can see what you are conveying.

Part 1: Primary Data Analysis:

Before you can examine the data, you must understand the problem and determine the research questions. What statistics will explain your situation?

Your first two paragraphs should discuss the importance of this issue or situation, clearly defined population, explicitly defined sample, and research questions. In these first two paragraphs, you also need a minimum of two references that present the history, background, or underlying ideas in order to frame the discussion. A minimum of two references to outside sources such as data from a newspaper/journal article, research study, university/corporate report, or national data set. You must cite your sources and put a minimum of two references in the reference page, not including the textbook.

Your next two paragraphs should introduce the company/organization and why it is important to them.

Please include:

a. A description of the historical and practical context, variables, units, terminology, and example/application to the real world.

b. Clearly defined dependent and independent variables

c. Levels of measurement of the variables (nominal, ordinal, interval, ratio)

d. Sampling methodology

e. A minimum of one of each, preferably more: confounding, lurking, and missing variables. State the problems you might encounter with missing variables or information.

f. Experimental or observational study; qualitative or quantitative research

g. One or more graphs, charts, images to give the reader a visual understanding of the background of the topic.

h. A description of the information you collect and how it relates to the big picture of social and economic trends.

Cover Page with: (1) your name, (2) title of the paper, (3) course name/number, (4) university name/term of enrollment, and (5) picture that represents the study you are conducting

Describe/explain the problem

Collect data from two outside sources to explain how society considers this problem (put references to these in the bibliography

Describe the quantitative data

What type of study is this?

How was the sample collected? What was the probably sampling method?

What is the level of measurement - nominal, ordinal, interval, ratio?

Experimental or Observational study?

What is the research question?

Describe the independent and dependent variables

Describe each of these as they relate to the study: confounding, lurking, missing variables

What are both the sample and population and describe each?

1" margins, 12 pt font, Times New Roman, name and page number at the top right, MLA/APA format (1 point each)

Grammatically correct throughout entire

No spelling errors throughout the entire paper

Part 2: Examination of Descriptive Statistics

Your next step is to organize and examine the data provided. This section is designed to present the calculations, graphs, and explanation of what you have found. Since all inferential tests are based on several assumptions, before you conduct the inferential statistics, you want to make sure that you are not violating any assumptions. In Part 2, you need to answer the following questions:

Mean, Median, Mode, and Five Number Summary

Range, Variance, and Standard Deviation

Graphs Presenting the Data - Histogram and Boxplot

Graph/Descriptive Statistics Presenting Data - Get this from an outside source that supports what you are presenting or presents new and interesting information that adds to the discussion (put the reference to these in the reference section)

Normally Distributed or Skewed?

Presentation of the outliers with the formula used to determine if there are outliers

Hint: You could do this using a visual inspection of the graph, but just looking at the graph is not enough for this course. Since you have learned statistics, you must use a mathematical method for determining outliers for this report. After all, you are armed with statistics to prove whether or not there is an outlier. You may either use the standard deviation method to identify extreme scores or 1.5 x IQR. Use whatever method you want to determine if there are any outliers and explain what you did and the calculations you used to determine if any data lies outside of the boundaries.

Corrections: Based on your inspection of the outliers are there any errors that should be corrected? How would you correct them? Discuss the implications of this result.

Part 3: Examination of Inferential Statistics

Assuming that all assumptions have been met, it is now time for you to conduct some inferential statistics. While you will need to do a hypothesis test, you will also either (1) compute a confidence interval, (2) find out if there is a correlation, or (3) use a regression line. You need to describe your hypotheses, assumptions, and tests used.

- Present your assumptions, the hypothesis test you used, and how the inferential statistics fits into the overall analysis presented in this paper.

- State the null and alternative hypotheses

- What is the significance level of the hypothesis test?

- One or two-tailed test?

- What is the test statistic?

- What is the p-value?

-Explain your results of accepting or rejecting the null hypothesis

Hint:A final conclusion that said "reject the null hypothesis" by itself without explanation is basically worthless to those who hired you. Similarly, stating that the conclusion is false or rejected is not sufficient.

- Also, either present either a confidence interval, correlation coefficient, or regression line

- Explain the inferential statistics and how they connect to the research question and study's purpose

- Describe and connect the inferential statistics to the descriptive statistics presented in part 2

Part 4: Conclusion and Recommendations

Using the results from your hypothesis test, correlation, confidence interval, and/or other measures, explain what the results mean.

- What does all of this mean? Put the pieces together for the reader in the first paragraph of the conclusion.

- What should the reader know about the descriptive and inferential statistics and what information, variables, or supporting evidence might lead you, the researcher, or the reader to a different conclusion?

- How could you draw a more certain conclusion? What do outside sources think about this topic? Does society think this is more or less important and who should care about the results?

- What qualitative or quantitative data would you want to collect if you were hired to do a follow up study? What would you look for if you were to analyze this further?

- Using the research you gathered and information you presented, what recommendations can you now state about the issue or topic that needs to be further clarified or analyzed?

- Reference Page - Provide at least two, but preferably more references to information you gathered for your citations. Put these in MLA or APA format.

- Appendix - An appendix is required with at least the original information.

FORMAT: Word document, with graphs, reference section, and appended original data, outside information, and cited work.

APA or MLA Format with name and page number at the top of each page

Write Up/Body: The body should be 5-10 pages with the graphs, images, screen shots, data output, and text. Additional cover page, reference page, and appendix.

References: Please include all articles, books, websites, publications, or other information that helped you reach your conclusion. The references come before the appendix. At least two references are required.

Appendices: You must have an appendix(this comes after the reference section); this might be an additional 1-2 pages. In the appendix, include original data and supplemental information. You may also want to include computations, but this is not necessary. It may be helpful when you refer to this later or if the reader wants to review your computations.

The study you will write about for yourfinal class project is on shopping habits.

Study: Business/Society

Companies want to know if women spend more money on clothing than men. While this is generally believed to be true, some merchandising executives hypothesize that men shop less frequently and spend more money each time, while women shop more frequently and spend less than men on each visit. This might mean that advertising and marketing would need to be adjusted to fit these different types of shoppers. Thus, on a random day just after Thanksgiving, researchers went out to a popular shopping mall to determine how much people spend for each of their entire set of clothing and accessory purchases. You are asked to analyze the given data and present your results to the marketing company with a hypothesis test at the 0.05 significance level and other requirements as listed above.