Description

Final Paper Assignment

OPTION 1:

You have just joined the Orange County, Florida, City Manager’s office as an unpaid intern.  The city has a whole bunch of data that it recently collected on public perceptions of the county government.  The city manager would like a report on the survey results.  He is particularly concerned about people’s attitudes toward the city government – including their satisfaction with services and their level of trust in the government.  The city manager is also concerned about variation in views – are people’s views of the city government influenced by their race, gender, or other such considerations?

OPTION 2:

You are hired by Seminole County, Florida to help them make sense of some recent data they have collected on employee satisfaction.  They are particularly concerned about how they can make their employees happy – what aspects of the job are most important in determining job satisfaction, and how can they use this knowledge to make their people happier?

WHICHEVER OPTION YOU CHOOSE:

You will be expected to work in a team of about 4 people and present your findings in an oral presentation on either December 5 or December 12.  You will have a thirty-minute time slot, to be filled with your presentation and with questions from other assembled employees.  Group assignments and presentation dates will be determined tonight.

Following this, you will be expected (individually) to write a short report on what the city needs to know.  This will be due on December 19.  The report should be absolutely no more than seven pages (doubled-spaced), and should definitely be non-technical.  While you are free to include tables within the body of the report, they should be limited to frequencies, percentages, or other such simple statistics.  The report should be a stand-alone document capable of being understood by someone without statistical training.

Following the report, you should include a technical appendix in which you lay out the detail behind what you wrote in the main report.  This is where you would include more sophisticated analyses (correlations, t-tests, ANOVA, regression, etc.), including your tables.  This section should be written as if to someone who understands statistics.  The tables you include should be incorporated into the Technical Appendix (not just tacked on at the end) and should be clearly labeled and numbered.

The written assignment is an individual (not group) assignment due to Canvas by 9 p.m. on Thursday, December 19.  Please include all materials (report, technical appendix, tables) in one file that you submit on Canvas.  I look forward to seeing your best work on this!