Assignment 3 - Quantitative Analysis
NOTE: This is an individual assignment. There will be no pair/group work on this assignment.
Introduction
From time to time, Governments commission the collection of data, and then make this data publicly available. The Victorian Government has released data which is available from this site: https://www.data.vic.gov.au/
During National Science Week, from 13 to 21 August 2011, the ABC Science Online hosted a citizen science project that provided an opportunity for citizens to participate in research being undertaken by Australian researchers. https://www.data.vic.gov.au/data/dataset/australians-interest-and-engagement-with- science
In 2011, the science research topic was multi-tasking and the Victorian Government Department of State Development, Business and Innovation (DSDBI) was offered
the opportunity to frame a series of questions around Australians’ interest and engagement with science to add to the ABC survey.
The data is old, and the questionnaire is missing, however a spreadsheet can be downloaded from:
https://www.data.vic.gov.au/data/dataset/australians-interest-and-engagement-with- science/resource/dc730e2d-f6af-47c9-844c-9cd6299ffb8e
Your task is to study the data and write a summary report about it. The report needs to answer the following two research questions:
Data Analysis
Your task is to analyse the quantitative and qualitative data provided and write a report with your findings.
You may use any tools you like for the analysis: Excel, SPSS, R, scripting languages, web-based tools such as the on-line Adjusted Wald calculator, etc.
Requirements for Data Analysis
The data has already been cleaned and encoded (although you may find some issues or wish to encode things, or re-organise the data for analysis, in which case you should document what you have chosen to do).
For your research you will need to:
Requirements for Your Report
You will need to:
Report Presentation
To achieve maximum marks your work must fulfil these criteria:
You may choose an academic paper format (eg. IEEE) or an industry report layout.
Introduction
From time to time, Governments commission the collection of data, and then make this data publicly available. During National Science Week, from 13 to 21 August 2011, the ABC Science Online hosted a citizen science project that provided an opportunity for citizens to participate in research being undertaken by Australian researchers.
In 2011, the science research topic was multi-tasking and the Victorian Government Department of State Development, Business and Innovation (DSDBI) was offered the opportunity to frame a series of questions around Australians’ interest and engagement with science to add to the ABC survey.
Objective
The main objection of this study is divided in 2 main research questions:
Design
I considered the dataset of only the relevant fields which has been segregated in the excel sheets as well and the analysis is based on that relevant dataset only. The fields of relevant dataset are, ID, Age, Age band, Age Band 2, Postcode, State Gender, Work Situation, Science Education & Science Work Situation.
There were few missing values in Postcode and they were replaced by 0. The missing values in State column was replaced by AUS. In Science Education column, all the inputs were replaced by Yes or No, where Yes means they have studied Science at any level of their education career and No means they have never studied Science at any level of their education career. Don’t Know was also consider in No. In Science Work Situation, all the inputs were replaced by Yes or No, where Yes means they are working in Science industry and No means they are not working in science industry. Don’t know was also consider in No.
A pivot table was created to answer our research question mentioned in the objective and will be talked about in detail in the following section of Analysis. In cell K16, a descriptive statistics result is shown of Age group.
Analysis
Considering our first research question which is: We are interested in the demographics of the people in Australia who are most interested in Science. This study is to find where they live, which age group do they belong and what is their gender? We made a pivot table where in we put Science Education in Filter and active only Yes fields. We put States and Science Education in various fields to get the relevant insights. The graph below show results and we can see that State NSW has the maximum number of people who have studied science at any level of their education career. We can also see that NT is the state which has least number of people who studied science at any level of their education career.
The graph below shows the various age groups which have studied science at any level of their education career. We can see that the age group 35-44 YO has the greatest number of people having studied Science whereas, age group 65+ have the least number of people having studied Science. We have set legend as Age Band 2 which basically segregates the whole age group into two parts Under 35 and 35+. So here Red Bars represents Under 35 and Blue Bars represents 35+.
The graph below shows the gender segregation who have studied science at any level of their education career. It is clearly visible that the number of females who have studied science are almost double the number of males who have studied science.
Considering our second research question which is: We would like to consider those who have an education in Science and find out whether or not they are employed in a Science-based job? The graph below has Science Education section activated as Yes and Science Education and Science Work Situation is been considered to get the insights. We can clearly see that people who are not working in the science industry after having studied science at any level of their education career is almost 5 times more that those who have studied science and have been working in the science industry itself. This clearly states that people who study science are most likely to pursue some other industry in the future rather than stick to science industry.
Recommendation
Conclusion
We clearly saw that there is a large gap between Males and Females studying science at their early stage level, there is a large gap between people who studied science but now are working in different industry than being in the science industry itself. This insight would give an overview of how things are right now and what can be done to improve the numbers so that an evenly matched numbers can be seen in the coming years.