Quantitative Data Analysis: Citizen Science Project Assessment Answer

Answer :

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:

1. 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? 
2. 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?

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

1. Australian government should create more jobs in science industry because the above data shows that people who study science are most likely to pursue some other industry as their future which is not what should happen.
2. The reach of science should be distributed to all the regions equally but we can see that some regions have good number in terms of people studying science where as some regions are below par and should be taken into account.
3. There should be more awareness about science within the community as there are twice a greater number of females opting to study science than males.

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.