Some Commonly Asked Questions About Your
Data Collection/Analysis Presentation...
and some answers :)

1. How should I do my presentation?

Not to be intentionally vague but...any way you want to. You can use Power Point, the Web, posters, overhead transparencies, the white board, a skit, whatever method you chose to convey your study and its results to your classmates is fine with me.

This presentation is informal. You are just sharing with your classmates what you did, what you asked, and what you found out about the relationship between two variables. Relax, smile, be creative and have fun.

2. What elements does my presentation need to convey? (and time suggestions)

• the research question: what did you ask? (1 minute maximum)
• predictions (optional): if you had any ideas about the study before you did it, what did you think you would find? (1 minute maximum)
• the design of the study: how did you conduct the study? (2 minute maximum)
• the collected data: show us the "raw data"...what you collected (1 minute maximum)
• the analysis: univariant and bivariant statistical analysis (3 minute maximum)
• the results & conclusions: what did you find? any thoughts about why? (2 minute maximum)

3. What do you mean by design of the study?

After you decided on a question, how did you collect data ?

Did you do a survey? If so, describe your sample - who, how many, when, etc.

did you use already collected/reported data? If so, from what source(s) ?

4. How do I report my raw data?

frequency tables, charts, graphs, pictures...whatever you like and whatever makes sense with your data :)

5. What do you mean by univariant analysis?

You should have collected data about 2 variables. Example:

Variable 1. Number of pets

Variable 2. Number of speeding tickets

Take each variable separately (one at a time - univariant - one variable) and run some statistical analysis on the data if provided. You might want to include: mean, median, mode, range, standard deviation, outliers, etc. You don't have to report all of these and you can certainly report others...just describe your data in a way that you think informs the audience...briefly :)

6. What do you mean by bivariant analysis?

This is when you want to discuss correlation...that's it :) A scatter plot relating the two variables would be helpful here.

Answer the question: Is there any correlation? (or can you use one variable to predict another?)

• If yes, what kind of relationship exists (linear, exponential, etc)? justify
• If no, why not? what about your data, scatter plot, etc. led you to this decision.

7. What do you mean by results and conclusions?

Summarize! Here are some ideas of things to think about

• What did you find?
• Was it expected?
• Can you offer possible reasons for your results?
• What might happen if you used a different sample size...results change, stay the same?
• Could you comfortably use your results to make predictions or generalizations?