Main objective: To demonstrate ability to maintain a linked set of
statistical investigations into what is really going on in the data,
and to find/discover/invent fresh questions to be asked of it.
coursework description:
You are invited to write a paper, addressing a problem that you
have identified, inspired by one of the datasets described below. As
these are long datasets, you may decide to focus on a subset
explaining why and how you decided to do so (e.g., random
selection, companies belonging to a specific category, ..). You are
also encouraged to further research and expand the subset in
terms of additional variables developing insights into issues hinted
at in the existing data.
There are two datasets available for you to choose from. They are
as follows:
WMS2015.sav contains data from the World management survey
(www.worldmamangementsurvey.org ).This is a publicly available
file which you can access and also find details on the relevant
methodology followed (i.e. questionnaire which can also be found in
the Overview-of-Management-Questions-Across-Sectors.pdf).
The second file, Investments_VC.sav Originally from Crunchbase,
has been downloaded from Kaggle.com (start-up investments) and
has a CC0: Public Domain license. It contains data on entrepreneurial
ventures receiving funding and has been partly cleared to facilitate
processing. The company details, status (operating / closed /
acquired) and the investments series at a company level (total
funding, seed, venture, ..) are given.
Content
1. Follow the general structure of an academic paper with
relatively less emphasis on the literature review. Detailed
description of the problem you intend to address, study
objective(s) or hypotheses, methods you have applied and
findings. Discuss insights into more specific aspects of the
main results that you have been able to obtain with your
analyses. Conclude suggesting a set of interesting and
relevant questions that further analyses could have explored,
also indicating the type of data required for such endeavours.
2. The final piece should be of no more than 2000 words*. It
should be written clearly and be well organized using
selectively and appropriately drawn Tables and Figures
(numbered and labelled).
Comments:
If you perform complicated operations for your analyses and you
want to make sure that they are appreciated by the readers of your
work, you can place these analyses in an appendix at the end of the
report. In any case, the actual workings in SPSS or any analytical
package you may use should be saved in a separate file and
submitted as the second .spv file (or respective file from another
package).
Use the Harvard referencing system.
*The word limit does not include references, Tables, Figures and
appendices with workings; everything else is included.
You must submit two files: the report (.doc or .pdf) file and the
SPSS (.spv) file with your workings.
This will be evaluated in terms of:
Content (Competence in recognition and diagnosis of cues and
issues identified in the dataset; quality and originality of analyses;
critical discussion of themes and issues unveiled by the analyses)
Structure (extent of coverage, quality of integration) and
Presentation (Clarity of communication, creativity, referencing)
