EC2116: You Are Required To Pick A Newspaper Or Magazine And Read Any Article Of Your Interest: Introduction To Statistical Economic Analysis Assignment, UCD, Ireland

You are required to pick a newspaper or magazine (online or in print) and read any article of your interest. Alternatively, you can just browse Twitter or Facebook. You have to find an article similar to the ones we have been discussing during the lectures or the tutorials (“One in five students think X”, “More than 30 million people a year visit Y”, “The average cost of Z is”).

Once you have found a statistic, develop the following points in a professional manner.

1. Where does the statistic come from? Is it a piece of research that the author of the article has carried out themselves, or are they citing some research conducted by someone else?

2. Is the statistic something that is known precisely, or is it an estimate from a sample? If it is the former, how did the researchers manage to get information from every person or item in the population of interest?

3. If, as it is most likely, the statistics is an estimation from a sample:

a) What is the population of interest?

b) What is the sample size?

c) Are there any important ways in which the sample is likely to differ from the population of interest? Think about sampling bias.

d) If there are differences between the sample and the population of interest, how are they likely to affect the statistic? Do they mean that the statistic is likely to be too high or too low?

e) If an average measure is used in the article, which one is being used? Is it the mean, median, or mode? Is this a good choice?

f) Are there likely to be large outliers?

g) Is a comparison being made in terms of raw counts when percentages would be more appropriate? Is the right percentage being used?

4. Taking all these elements into consideration, do you think the statistic tells us something useful about the real word or it is misleading?

Your analysis, addressing all of the above points, should be written up in a report, not to exceed 3,000 words. Your report should include the reference to the article you are analyzing (the link where I can read it), and your discussion should refer to specific elements of that article and lecture material to support your findings in relation to each of the above points. There is no need to reproduce lecture material, but you should of course include enough evidence to support the points you are making in response to each of the above requirements. You can address the above points in the logical order your argumentation requires (i.e., you do not have to follow the order given above, should this make the narration difficult to follow).

The level of professional presentation, which includes writing style, layout, and presentation of tables and graphs, etc (if needed to your argument), will be considered when deciding on a grade. To improve the level of professional presentation you should do more than one draft and consider the following as you draft; organize your paragraphs such that there is a point to each paragraph, check spelling and grammar checks, appropriately label and source graphs and tables, appropriately add references to your sources.