Research activities before completing the discussion board

Your findings from this research activity feed into the post you will prepare for the following discussion forum. Each of the two research activities should take you about 30 minutes to complete, or 60 minutes in total.

These activities aim for you to complete your own investigations of real-life data scenarios that interest you. This is an opportunity for you to reflect upon the concepts discussed in Week 1 of the course, together with suitable research questions that can be addressed using the data.

Find two data scenarios to explore and report

Research activity 1. Statistics in the news

Pick up a recent issue of a national newspaper, for instance, The Telegraph, The Guardian, Daily Mail or Daily Mirror (refer to ‘See also’ section for links). These are all UK newspapers, but you are welcome to select your national newspaper.

It may also be useful to consult some news websites, for instance, BBC news, Sky news, ITV news or CNN (again, please feel free to search other recognised news websites).

Tasks:

1. Identify an article that mentioned data or referred to statistical methods.
2. Did it use descriptive statistics, inferential statistics, or both? Explain.
3. Write a brief summary (100 words) of your findings and conclusions.

Research activity 2. Downloading data from the internet

For this second activity, select one database to explore from the list provided.

We can take advantage of existing archived collections of data files, called databases. Many internet databases are available. By browsing various websites, you can obtain information about many topics.

Here are some popular databases that can be informative to browse (refer to the ‘See Also’ section for links):

• Google provides a starting place for finding data through their data set search. Type in the topic you want to research, and you may find relevant databases published by governments and academic or private institutions. Google also maintains a list of over 100 databases on their public data site.
• The website YouGov collects and hosts UK survey data on a broad variety of topics, from politics to food, travel and entertainment.
• The General Social Survey (GSS) has collected and stored survey data about hundreds of characteristics of many thousands of people.
• The World Bank publishes a vast amount of economic and other indicators, including climate statistics, such as CO₂ emissions for hundreds of countries.
• If you are interested in polls about people’s beliefs see Gallup polls.
• Office for National Statistics (ONS) is the UK’s governmental body producing and holding vast amounts of official statistics.
• The US Government  and the European Union have data on topics ranging from agriculture to public safety.
• For a huge variety of data about all sorts of topics, check out Kaggle datasets which provide over 14,000 different datasets, many of which are sourced from private companies.

Tasks:

1. Download one dataset of your liking.
2. Make a note of the data structure and source.
3. Was the data collected using random sampling? Are there any likely biases or omissions?
4. Reflect on what research questions this data could help to explore.
5. Write a brief summary (100 words) of your findings and conclusions.

Next steps

After completing the two activities on this page, prepare your discussion posts so you can post them on the discussion board that follows.