*Group Project: Preliminary draft

The preliminary draft is your first opportunity to get feedback regarding the style, content, and organizational structure of your project as a whole. While it is understood that these drafts are early and rough, they should represent a strong attempt to incorporate feedback from previous assignments and to integrate the work of each individual student's analysis in a cohesive overall project. This should resemble your intentions for the final product, meaning that both form and function should be an approximation of your expectations for the final report. If you have some things you intend to do but haven't yet due to time constraints, provide XXplaceholder textXX to let me know you intend to make improvements. 

The outline for projects is generally as follows:

0. Executive summary (don't write this yet--this will be part of your final grade but you likely don't have enough information to write this yet)

1. Discussion of overall purpose of the project and an outline/agenda for the content of the report

2. Information about the data collected for the project, including descriptive statistics, descriptions of important variables (key constructs and their operationalization), sample size and methodology, research design, etc.

3. Critiques of the data/design/sampling procedures (these may also be appropriate in a later section--use your discretion in placement of this section).

4. One or more additional sections focused on specific causal-type relationships predicting important outcome variables. I suggest one section per dependent variable (or set of dependent variables, such as "heath outcomes."). For each of these sections, the final report should include the following (you are not likely to have the multivariate analysis completed at this point):

a. Univariate analysis (confidence intervals, single-sample tests, and similar) to describe the DEPENDENT variable(s) and any key independent variable(s).

b. Bivariate analysis (identify significant relationships between one (or more, one at a time) key independent variables and the dependent variable of interest), suggesting the need for further analysis (or to rule out the need for further analysis).

c. Multivariate analysis (This is the culminating analysis and should include all relevant independent and control variables for the dependent variable)

d. Conclusions and implications drawing from all three types of analysis (but primarily the multivariate analysis).

5. Overall conclusions and implications resulting from the project as a whole.

Each analysis section should focus on meaningful, SUBSTANTIVE FINDINGS and also include the name of the test used and the appropriate test statistics (e.g. t-value, p-value). Each subsection should have its own meaningful results in addition to the overall section and project-level implications and results.

In general, I would expect each student to contribute at least one multivariate model and related univariate/bivariate models for the final report (focus on one dependent variable). In some cases, more or fewer models/analysis will be necessary to fully answer the questions posed by the project and/or community partner.

Here is a project template that may be useful to you as you start thinking about how to organize this project:

Statistics Report Template1.docx Download Statistics Report Template1.docx