The culmination of material covered in RSCH 8210: Quantitative Reasoning and Analysis and RSCH 8260: Advanced Quantitative Reasoning and Analysis will provide you with a number of tools for your statistical toolbox. An enthusiastic apprentice always looks forward to the day where the skills learned can be put into action, to display a product to the world that demonstrates they are now an artisan. The purpose of the Final Project in this course is much like a Final Project an apprenticing craftsperson might undertake. This project will utilize the amalgam of your quantitative skills to demonstrate that you can: 1. Align an appropriate statistical test to a research question you constructed. 2. Find data that meets the assumptions of your statistical tests and answers your research question. 3. Synthesize the results to articulately present the findings via an oral presentation. 4. Present the results in a formal, written document. 5. Document how quantitative methods can assist with social change.

Expectations

Data

You are free to use data that you obtain on your own or utilize one of the datasets from the course but, to make the project more meaningful to you, it is highly recommended that you find your own data. If you use one of the datasets from the course, please make sure that you are not mimicking a project already posted in one of the weekly Collaboration Labs. You can find existing data through a number of clearinghouses on the web (i.e., NIH, ICPSR, NIJ, NCES, www.data.gov, etc.). If you are having difficulty obtaining data, please be sure and contact your Instructor for some suggestions. You may also want to consider data from your workplace but be sure you have permission to use it for learning purposes.

Deliverables

You have three deliverables for this project. The first is an oral 5- to 7-minute presentation that you post to the Week 11 Discussion Board. You can create a video directly in Blackboard using Kaltura; information to help you complete this task is available via the Kaltura Media Uploader link on the course navigation menu. Your video should be targeted toward a lay statistical audience. That is, consider giving a presentation of your results to your co-workers/team, a group who might not have the level of statistical knowledge you now hold. All too often, the results of great projects are not implemented because the researcher did not translate the results and communicate the findings to the research consumer.