Front Page

• State the title of your study. It should clearly reflect the core of your analysis.

• An Executive Summary. Your executive summary should:

 Be brief and punchy, and easy to read. It should sell the rest of the report – motivate the time poor reader to spend the time digesting it.

 Clearly state your key finding(s), quantifying where possible, and very brief description of any key opportunity(s) / problem(s) identified.

 Summarise any key recommendations (or next steps).

Section 1: Introduction

 Explain:

• Your (assumed) role in a private or public organisation (e.g. product development manager in a household appliances company or a policy officer in a government agency.)

• The objective of your study.

• Why this study is important. How the findings from this study could help inform business decisions and/or policy.

Section 2: Survey Questionnaire and Procedure

• Present your survey questionnaire in the ‘Appendix’ section of your report.

This implies that you must consider only the most important questions that meet your study objective. It is difficult to put a word limit for a questionnaire and hence your questions and answers should be clear and concise.

• Describe how you tested your survey questions before you ran your survey and any key learnings you gained from this. 

• Describe how you collected your data, and why you collected it in this way. 

Section 3: Data Presentation and Analysis

• It is essential that you demonstrate your ability in applying the knowledge you learnt from Chapters 1 to 5 using your survey data. Specifically, you are required to present and analyse the important and relevant variable/s using:

• A summary table

• A contingency table.

• A chart which shows the frequency of values for a variable. (eg pie or column or bar chart, etc)

• Three different chart types which show the relationship between two variables.

Ideally one of these should feature two categorical variables, one should feature two numerical variables, and one feature a mix. Your discussion of the relationship between two numerical variable should include an interpretation of the correlation coefficient.

• Probability. Determine at least one conditional probability and compare it with the corresponding marginal probability. Discuss what the comparison implies with respect to one of you key objectives for the study. Show your calculations.

Section 4: Conclusion

• Comment on the implications of your findings for business or policy decision making. (i.e. the “so what”.) Note that this section should not be used to simply repeat the discussion of results.

• Comment on three limitations of your survey (e.g. variables selection, measurement of variables, sampling method etc.) 

• For future studies, make suggestions on improvements that address each of the limitations. Support your suggestions with three relevant references from your BEA603 resources (text, videos, supplementary slides, tutorial content, or suggested readings).