Small Project – Summative Assessment – Explain how you might use statistics in public safety (your field). You don’t need to be technical in your explanation of exact statistical test, but a general idea of descriptive statistics, testing for differences in groups, relationship, or prediction (as given below.) Explain the situation, and as much detail as you’ve learned in this class to explain how statistics and research methods might help you in further understanding and/or testing the situation to make organizational decisions.
Here’s some information that might help you:
Descriptive Statistics: Mean, median, mode (measures of central tendency), frequency distributions, range, Quartiles, Variance and Standard Deviation
Differences in Groups: T-tests (group differences between two groups), ANOVA (stands for Analysis of variance – differences between and within one or more groups), Chi-Square (looks at what we expected versus what the observed values are in a group)
Relationships: Correlation – If one variable goes up or down when another variable goes up or down. Example research question could be: “If poverty rises, do crime rates rise?” Or could be non-directional by asking “What happens to the rate of crime when poverty rates rise?”
Prediction: Regression – One variable will predict whether the other variable will move up or down (very close to a correlation – it is a relationship, but actually predicts movement in the other variable): “When poverty rises, crime rates will rise” (see the difference?), but we could also ask the same question as the correlation “What happens to the rate of crime when poverty rates rise?” It all depends which test you choose to do – correlation or regression. When you do a regression analysis, you do run a correlation anyways. You will learn more about this in a later class!!
How to use Excel VideoURL
This is a tutorial on how to use Excel. If you have experience using Excel, you do not need to watch this, but for those who are not familiar with Excel or have limited familiarity with Excel, this video will be helpful prior to your assessment.
Excel-Basic Descriptive StatisticsURL
This is the video you will use to recreate an excel worksheet for your assessment
Installing Excel Data Analysis ToolpakFile
This is the directions for installing the Data Analysis Tookpak in Excel. You won’t need this for this class, but you will need it for future classes or if you want to try out some of the statistical analysis functions in Excel prior to taking the next class.
Summative Assessment – Week 4Assignment
Submit both your Excel worksheet and your write up for a scenario in which you could use statistics in public safety, here.
Excel: Recreate the entire descriptive statistics worksheet from the video you watched and submit the worksheet.
Scenario: Describe a scenario within public safety (any field that is of interest to you) that could use statistics to make a business decision, improve a process, or complete a daily function. Explain the situation, what it is (with as much information as you can from this class) that you would use, why that would be appropriate for the situation, and how it would improve the process.
Submit both documents to this assessment.
And I would like to use a Correctional scenario.
