Your Final Project will consist of two parts. Part One will involve critiquing research that has been performed by others. You will need to critically evaluate the researcher's work by identifying strengths, weaknesses, areas to improve, and possible extensions of the research.

Pick ONE and thoroughly read ONE of the following three articles. You will need to utilize your research skills by locating them using the Internet.

Weick, K.E. 1993. The collapse of sensemaking in organizations: The mann gulch disaster. Administrative Science Quarterly, 38: 628-652. ?

Ashenfelter, O. and Kreuger, A. (1994) Estimates of the economic return to schooling from a new sample of twins. American Economic Review, 84(5), December, 1158-1173. ?

Card, D., Krueger, A.B. (1994). Minimum wages and employment: a case study of the fastfood industry in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. American Economic Review, 84(4), 77293.

Once you have read your article, you will write a critique. In your critique, discuss the following: ?

• Research methods used ?
• Why the authors selected the methods
• What other methods could have been used ?
• Why the other methods would have been applicable

In addition, discuss the primary results of the paper and how these results could be applied to a business application. Your paper must follow current APA standards and be no more than three pages in length, not including any appendices or attachments.

Part TWO will involve developing a regression model for a topic of your choosing in an attempt to explain a phenomenon of interest. In doing so, you will be required to locate data on the Internet and do the appropriate analysis. You will also have to explain your topic of interest, the variables chosen, and why the variables were chosen, in addition to presenting and explaining your results. Your paper should include the following:

1. Introduction - describe the phenomena you are attempting to model and its importance (2 - 3 paragraphs)
2. Literature Review (find at least two references) - who has done similar work and what were their findings? (2 - 3 paragraphs) ?
3. Data - summary statistics of the data (2 - 3 paragraphs) ?
4. Methods and Results - what analysis did you perform and what were the expectations for the model? Were your results similar to those in the references you used? (3 - 6 paragraphs) ?
5. Conclusions (2 - 3 paragraphs)

Your paper must follow current APA standards. Be sure to include tables as necessary and to label them properly (review the APA manual and the readings from Module 1).

Throughout the course there have been many topics related to analyzing data that you should consider including in your write-upsuch as a graph of the data. In the Appendix, you may want to include graphs used to evaluate normal distribution. A discussion of the results of such analysis should be included in the results section of the paper.