Business Research Methods Chap015

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15-2McGraw-Hill/Irwin © 2003 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.,All Rights

Reserved.

Part FourANALYSIS AND

PRESENTATION OF DATA

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Chapter FifteenDATA PREPARATION AND

DESCRIPTION

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Editing

• Detects errors and omissions,

• Corrects them when possible, and

• Certifies that minimum data quality standards are achieved

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Editing (cont.)

• Guarantees that data are

– accurate

– consistent with other information

– uniformly entered

– complete

– arranged to simplify coding and tabulation

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Editing

• Field Editing

– translation of ad hoc abbreviations and symbols used during data collection

– validation of the field results.

• Central Editing

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Coding

• Rules that guide the establishment of category sets– Appropriate to the research problem

and purpose– Exhaustive– Mutually exclusive– Derived from one classification

principle

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Content Analysis for Coding

• Measures the semantic content of a message

• Researches the objective, systematic, and quantitative description of the content of a communication

– Syntactical unit

– Referential unit

– Propositional unit

– Thematic unit

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Data Entry Options

• Optical scanning

• Voice recognition

• Keyboard

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Data Entry Formats

• Database with full screen editor

• Spreadsheet

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Descriptive Statistics

• Distribution Descriptors

– Location

– Spread

– Shape

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Descriptive Statistics

• Distribution Descriptors

– Location• Central Tendency

– Mean – Median – Mode

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Descriptive Statistics

• Distribution Descriptors

– Spread• Variance, • Standard Deviation, • Range, • Interquartile Range

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Descriptive Statistics

• Distribution Descriptors

– Shape

• Skewness

• Kurtosis