You are also required to write a 5-7 page (double-spaced) research essay to demonstrate how you apply the analytical methods that you learn from this course to real-world inquiries. You will make use of data that I will provide to you in order to conduct descriptive statistics and inferential techniques in your essay. I would suggest you organize your writing in a professional way by answering the following questions successively in your essay:
1) What are your research questions? What are your analysis units (observations)?
2) What are your hypotheses, including the dependent variable and independent variables, in your inferential analyses?
3) Describe the data set you are using: where did you get the data or how were the data collected? How big is the sample size?
4) How is each of the variables in your study measured? What are the measurement unit and measurement level? If you recoded any variable or generated any new variable, how did you do that?
5) Please use frequency distribution or central tendency statistics to summarize the variables. You may use tables and charts to present the data distribution.
6) Which inferential techniques do you use to examine the relationships between variables? And the reasons you use those techniques?
7) Report the results of your inferential analysis; and discuss whether your hypotheses are supported by the data evidence.
8) Provide implications of your research.
Considering the workload in final weeks, I will pose the data in a few weeks early this semester, so that you can start thinking about these questions and playing with the data.
