Statistics project

[Bullitt]

Ok folks here's the deal. I'm feverishly working on my stats project and need a bit of help in seeing how my wording is for this first portion of the paper (the non math part). It's due tomorrow by 10am so now is better than later if you've got anything to contribute. Yeah I know this is a little late in the game, procrastination has it's price. My main problems are (hooray growing up in the south) syntax (sentence structure). I'm hopped up on my Adderall atm so I'm hoping this is better than usual. So here it is, all constructive criticism welcome:


Design and Execution of the Study:
Being a commuter student myself, I decided to pursue a topic that I am personally interested in. The topic at hand is how important commuter student involvement on campus is to the general student population. My goal in this study was to investigate the variable of how important it is to the general student population to have commuter students more involved in on campus events. The questions ask to each individual sampled were: “Would you support an increase in school funding and number of events geared towards commuter students in order to get them more involved on campus? Or is the money better spent elsewhere on other projects such as dorm renovation, etc.?"
As of the Fall 2007 semester, the total enrollment for Malone College is 2385 students. This is my total population. As for a sample size, I chose to poll 5% of the total population giving me a sample size of 120 students. This study was observational in nature because I was not trying to influence the population in any way. I solely asked my questions and recorded the “yes” or “no” responses. Unfortunately, I had to resort to non-scientific convenience sampling in order to get my desired sample size. With a convenience sample comes a variety of issues that must be addressed, and I will do so later on when I go over the various issues and biases that I faced in researching this topic.

[Bullitt]

Ok nm. It's finished. Feedback is still welcome anyway. I won't post the entire thing since it's 5 pages long unless someone really wants to see how it ended up.
I'm going to hell to sleep now.

[ZenGum]

Hi Bullitt,
I have three specific suggestions. The points are marked in bold and my suggestions are in parentheses. I'm not sure you can use the third suggestion, since you must faithfully report the question you asked.
Also, the second and third sentences seem to say almost exactly the same thing. Maybe there are some statistician's conventions here you're following, but if not I suggest you condense those two sentences to one. I've marked uni essays and I loathe wading through repetition.
Also you kept spelling "computer student" wrong .

Design and Execution of the Study:
Being a commuter student myself, I decided to pursue a topic that I am personally interested in. The topic at hand is how important commuter student involvement on campus is to the general student population. My goal in this study was to investigate the variable of how important it is to the general student population to have commuter students more involved in on campus (on-campus) events. The questions ask to (asked of) each individual sampled were: “Would you support an increase in school funding (of) and number of events geared towards commuter students in order to get them more involved on campus? Or is the money better spent elsewhere on other projects such as dorm renovation, etc.?"



I'm curious to know a few things though.
Did you ask this as one question or two? That is, were respondents allowed to answer the first part before you asked the second? The second part of the question would swing the answers of dorm students towards "no" to the "more money for commuter students" proposal.

Also, where you did your sampling could swing the whole thing. Asking at the bus stop and car park would get lots of yeses, around the dorms, lots more noes.
I guess (too late now) that you should have asked two questions: first, are you dormer or commuter, then, should we spend more on getting the commuters to party with us? Since you know the proportion of dormers and commuters overall, you could then extrapolate from your samples for a more reliable picture.

You mention a few things that indicate you're wise to these issues though. Good luck.

[LabRat]

My changes in purple.

Originally Posted by Bullitt

Design and Execution of the Study:
As a commuter student, I decided to pursue a topic that I am personally interested in. I wanted to investigate the role that commuter students play in on campus events versus the general student population. My goal in this study was to have commuter students more involved in on campus events. The questions asked of each individual sampled were: “Would you support an increase in school funding and number of events geared towards commuter students in order to get them more involved on campus? Or is the money better spent elsewhere on other projects such as dorm renovation, etc.?"
As of the Fall 2007 semester, the total enrollment for Malone College is 2385 students. This is my total population. As for a sample size, I chose to poll 5% of the total population giving me a sample size of 120 students. (where did you poll them from? the union, a class? Need to be a neutral place, like Zen said, so as to not skew the results.) This study was observational in nature because I was not trying to influence the population in any way. I solely asked my questions and recorded the “yes” or “no” responses. Unfortunately, I had to resort to non-scientific convenience sampling in order to get my desired sample size. With a convenience sample comes a variety of issues that must be addressed, and I will do so later on when I go over the various issues and biases that I faced in researching this topic.

Personally, I would have gone to a few on campus events, then polled how many people there were on campus vs. off campus people. After figuring out what ppercentage of each total population that was then see if it's out of whack (higher percent of on campus vs off campus) There just might be less commuters, so overall it might look like there are less there, but in reality there are just as many, percentage wise. If that makes sense....

Then found off campus people who have never attended an on campus event, and found out why they hadn't.

[ZenGum]

Keep in mind, too, that off-campus people often choose that life because they don't want to be too involved in campus life.
Alternatively, some dormers may want to move off campus but don't want to miss out.

[Bullitt]

Thanks for the responses dude and dudette. I made significant changes in that first part and I think the entire paper turned out well. If you care for a look I've attached it.

[LabRat]

Hmm. Thanks! Let us know what grade you get.

[Bullitt]

Thanks LabRat I will. This is kind of an entry level stats class which is why this project was kind of simple overall. I also should have mentioned that this was all hypothetical but we had to write it as if we actually conducted the polls.

[ZenGum]

And I thought it was only us in the philosophy department that were allowed to just make stuff up.

Story of a friend working in the law library: A student said he as having trouble finding a case mentioned in the tute readings, my friend tried the database, no luck, the old card catalogue, no luck, online search, no luck ... finally asked to see the original citation ...
Ah, see this word here, "hypothetical", do you know what it means? ??