Data Analysis

Abstract

Management is concerned that the entire industry could be affected by current legislation so research was conducted on a random sample of thirty of the one hundred senators. The Senators' ages, years in the Senate, party affiliations, who is voting favorably versus those voting unfavorably, and their incomes are data groups chosen for analysis. This report includes data from that research and the results compiled from using Excel statistical tools for the data analysis. The mean, median and mode of the age, income, and number of years in the Senate have been calculated and as well as the standard deviation of their incomes including an explanation. The number years in the Senate has been grouped to provide the number of senators that make up the group with the least number of years in the Senate. Since party affiliation and voting preferences are data that cannot be averaged because they are nonnumeric, an explanation of the different types of data has been included as well as how it could be grouped for statistical analysis methods. The sampling method is also discussed and explained.

Data Analysis

Descriptive statistics are used to define the basic characteristics of a study's data. They provide a summary from a sample with measures that are the foundation of nearly all quantitative data analyses. Descriptive statistics help us to simplify large quantities of data and reduce it into a more manageable summary. In baseball for example, "a batting average is a summarized number that makes it easy to see how well a batter is performing at a glance" (Trochim, 2006). Descriptive statistics are used in this observational study to help make sense of the given data.

Age Mean 54.56666667 Median 53.5 Mode 55

Yrs. in Sen. Mean 14.13333333 Median 12 Mode 1

Income Mean 471.1666667 Median 285 Mode 250 Std. Dev. 365.7083

Standard deviation is an average measurement of how much items of a given group vary from the group's mean and provides a quantification of the broadness of the distribution. The income of a U.S. Senator appears to have a wide range. The years spent in the Senate have been put into four groups which include 0 – 10, 11 – 20, 21 – 30, and 31 – 40 years. The group of senators with the least amount of years in the Senate is the 0 – 10 group which contains 14 senators is the largest group. The 11 – 20 year group contains 8 senators, the 21 – 30 year group contains 5, and the final group consists of 3.

In statistics, there are several different types of data. Quantitative data is numerical and consists of numbers that represent