UGBS602: Research Methods RMBA/WMBA

EXAMS! EXAMS! VERY URGENT Breaking News 1:

Exam Duration is: Two Hours, Thirty Minutes (2.5 hrs)

Urgent Breaking News on EXAMS:

The Quantitative part of the exam (RMBA, WMBA) requires you answer 1 out of 2 questions. One is on Regression. Another on other topics combined. ALL THE BEST!!!

Sample exam questions below

Breaking News about IA &/or assignment:

In place of an IA, I have given you a group assignment which is in the regression slides. It is about cars. Every part of the assignment should be done using R Studio software and the results taken directly from R to your word (using cut and paste or snipping tool where apt) document for submission. The DEADLINE for submitting this assignment is Thursday 14th May by 12noon for EMBA Students. I have attached the mtcars data set (mtcars regression.xls) below. In the slides, it shows 30 observations but it is supposed to be 32 as in the preamble and in the attached below. It is important you use the data labeled (to this right link) in excel file as: mtcars regression.xls

Breaking News:

Download R at http://cran.r-project.org/. Or at: http://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/base/old/ it's free.

Breaking News: Download R Studio at http://www.rstudio.com/ide/

After installing both r & R Studio, you will never open R (which happens to icon on your desktop). Rather you only open R Studio, which is not shown on your desktop. To get it, go to "start", then begin to type: rstudio. It will show in the list. Now, right click and send the icon to desktop or pin to taskbar. From then on you will only open this R Studio. When you open, do these initial quick things. Go up to "Tool", then select "Global Options". A pop up shows. Now, on far left of that pop up, choose "pane layout". Then to the top right of this pane layout, tick "packages". If its already ticked, untick it 7 tick it again. Do the same for plot which is in the bottom-right box. tick it. After all these you will see that your R Studion is composed of 4 parts, first being the command window, below that being the console. After that, you never open R but rather only open the R Studio ( which is hidden in your programs and so you have to send the icon to the desktop). It will have the R running at the background.THE rest of the story continues in class.

News:

URGENTLY download the Brukutu Ventures excel data set. It will be used for correlation and regression lecture. Also, in Your R interface, go to Packages, then install and when the "install packages" dialogue box appears, please type the following packages into the 'packages' line and "install" below to download and install them before coming to class. Please ensure you have internet. The packages are (check spellings):

psych

Hmisc

car

ggplot2

gvlma

survival

foreign

grid

splines

Please ensure that you have gotten your research topics and/or areas ready. Contact your potential supervisors and/or department secretaries for more information.

Announcements:

  • Latest News: PRINT OUT & BRING MANN-WHITNEY TABLE TO CLASS THIS WEEK
  • Recent News: Please BRING YOUR LAPTOPS TO CLASS ALL THE TIME and download all tables at the bottom of this page and bring the tables to class. These are the t-table and Mann-Whitney table, F-table
  • Running News:
    • For those of you interested in doing a research on performance assessment of firms or organisations or want research topics for their projetcs, I suggest you attend my other MPHIL lecture on Decision & Risk Analysis in semester 2. It is rigorous & can help those who need to do project or even those who want to pursue MPhil/PhD. In fact, there are enough research topics we can discuss. Just let me know. But this is usually for serious students
  • Hot News: Please under construction
  • Important News: Please under construction
  • News: Please under construction

Lecture times:

Wed 7:30–9:20; at 1E1

Wed 11:30–13:20; at 1W1

Free Important Softwares: R http://www.r-project.org/

RStudio at http://www.rstudio.com/ide/ & PAST athttp://folk.uio.no/ohammer/past/

Download the manuals as well.

RStudio is the premier integrated development environment for R. It is available in open source and commercial editions and runs on the desktop (Windows, Mac, and Linux) or over the web with RStudio Server.The RStudio console includes a variety of features intended to make working with R more productive and straightforward.

http://www.andrewheiss.com/blog/2012/04/17/install-r-rstudio-r-commander-windows-osx/

For PAST, you may download the old version 2.17c HERE: http://nhm2.uio.no/norlex/past/download.html and

For PAST, you don't need to install it. You can work with it from a folder on your pendrive

IMPORTING DATA FROM EXCEL TO R

bp<-read.delim('clipboard') ## Copy your excel data from excel, come to the source here, type the command and wala!

For an intro to R see the youtube videos (in fact, you can subscribe to this guys videos):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJDrYUqNrHg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U69k3hjDlM0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5Z22gwnpCk

For R commander see

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V52baivx26w

REMEMBER "A little learning is a dangerous thing;

Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring". So you either drink managerial economics deep or you taste not.

QUESTION 1 (ONLINE)

Downloadables:

All the documents will be password-protected. To download, click on the arrow (which is to the right of the file) pointing downwards. Students have been given the passwords.

Key items below to download:

SAMPLE QUESTIONS

Shoprite supermarket sells 5000 packets of cereals which it now believes to be not as improved as the new brand they recently had in each of its stores. It has decided to test-market the new brand of cereal in some of its stores. After a month, the 15 stores have sold an average of 5200 packets each, with a standard deviation of 500 packets. Should all supermarkets switch to selling the new brand at the 1% level of significance?

    1. State the hypotheses
    2. How many degrees of freedom are there?
    3. State the decision rule.
    4. What is the value of the test statistic?
    5. Determine the t critical
    6. What is your decision regarding the null hypothesis?
    7. Estimate the p-value.
    8. Should all supermarkets switch to selling the new brand at the 1% level of significance? Is the difference due to chance? Explain briefly! (carries the highest mark)

In Ghana, mothers who live in poverty generally have babies with lower birth-weight than those who don’t live in poverty. While the average birth-weight of babies born in Ghana is about 3,300g, the average birth-weight of women living in poverty is at most 2,800g. Recently, Korle Bu introduced an innovative new pre-natal care programme to reduce the number of low birth-weight babies. In 2013, 25 mothers, all living in poverty participated in the programme. Data drawn from hospital records showed that the babies born to these women had the birth-weight of 3,075g with a standard deviation of 500g.

    1. Formulate the null and alternative hypotheses
    2. Is Z statistic to be used here? Why?
    3. Compute the value of the test statistic?
    4. What is the critical value of the test statistic
    5. Estimate the p-value and use it to decide
    6. Has the programme been effective at improving the birth-weight of babies born to poor women? Is the difference due to chance? Explain briefly!
    7. Formulate the null and alternative hypotheses H0: μ<=2800g; Ha: μ>2800g
    8. Is Z statistic to be used here? Why? NO because N=25<30
    9. Compute the value of the test statistic? t = (Ẍ-μ)/s/√N = (3,075-2800)/500/√25 = 2.75
    10. What is the critical value of the test statistic? t(n-1),α== t(25-1),0.05==1.711
    11. What is your decision regarding H0? Reject H0 as t=2.75>t-tab=1.711
    12. Estimate the p-value and use it to decide p-v=0.005<α=0.05, (1 tail) 5%, Reject H0
    13. Has the programme been effective at improving the birth-weight of babies born to poor women? Is the difference due to chance? Explain briefly! (carries the highest mark) YES. H0 is rejected in favour of the Ha. So, mean birth-weight is indeed > 2800g, which can be 3,075g, i.e. by more than 275g. NO!!! Difference is not by chance.

QUESTION 1 (ONLINE)

A group of reputable housing firms in Ghana claim that the mean price of residential homes before the change of government does not exceeds the mean price after the new government in Ghana came to power. Tonaton.com in Ghana wishing to determine the authenticity of the claim, selected a sample of residential properties to appraise their prices before and after the change of government. The results, reported in GHc000, are:

The proposed research course has two separate but closely related components – qualitative research and quantitative research. By becoming familiar with the research process in practice, students should be competent in developing research proposals, designing research projects, collecting and analyzing research data and results in their specialist areas. The topics to be covered include the Meaning of Research, Research Process and Design, Components of Research Proposal, Literature Review, Research Strategies (Survey, Case Study, Action Research and Ethnography), Sampling Analysis, Questionnaire Design, Data Collection, Research Ethics, Qualitative and Quantitative Data Analysis and Report Writing. Others are: Measurement Scale, Parametric & Nonparametric Hypotheses, ANOVA, simple, multiple, dummy and binary dependent regressions. The student will engage in a mini-research project to obtain a first-hand experience in applying the methods taught in the course.

Recommended Text

Paul Newbold, William Carlson, Betty Thorne 2013, Statistics for Business and Economics, 8th edition, Publisher: Prentice Hall

· Neuman, W.L. (2011) Basics of Social Research: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches, 2/E, Pearson Education – ISBN ISBN-10: 0205484379

· Bryman, A. and Bell, E. (2007) Business Research Methods (second edition), Oxford: Oxford University Press.

· Fisher, C. (2010) Researching and Writing a Dissertation, An Essential Guide For Business Students, Pearson Education Limited, Essex.

· Levin, J. Fox, J.A., and Forde, D.R. (2010) Elementary Statistics in Social Research, Pearson Education – 11/E, ISBN-10: 0205570690 | ISBN-13: 9780205570690

· Wisniewski M. (2006) Quantitative Methods for Decision Makers

· Thomas, R. (1997) Quantitative Methods for Business Studies, Hemel Hempstead: Prentice Hall.

· Morris, C. (2002) Quantitative Approaches in Business Studies, sixth edition, Harlow, Essex: Financial Times Prentice Hall

Supplementary readings will be provided by the lecturers

Aim & Content

The general objective of this course is to introduce students to methods of research. The specific objectives are:

(i) to ensure that students acquire practical research skills for business and academic research;

(ii) to help students understand principles of research; and quantitative methods they can use &

(iii) to enable students to link the research process with theories of their specialist areas.

QUESTION 4 (ONLINE)

Opeemu Fitness Center, through their adverts, claims that completing their course will result in losing weight. A random sample of recent participants showed the following weights before and after completing the course. Use 0.05 significance level

Kwame Asante, a clinical psychologist claims that the order in which questions are asked affects students’ ability to answer them. He believes that if questions progress from easy to hard, then more questions tend to be answered correctly. To test this claim, 20 students are divided at random into groups of 10. For group A students, the questions are asked in increasing order of difficulty and for group B students, they are asked in decreasing order of difficulty. The test scores in each group are as follows:

    1. State the null hypothesis and the alternate hypothesis.
    2. What is the critical value of the test statistic?
    3. What is the calculated value of the test statistic?
    4. Decide using the critical value approach.
    5. What is the p-value? Use it to decide
    6. Mention 2 assumptions that need to be made about the distribution of the differences?
    7. Have the participants lost weight at the 5% significance level? Conclude practically.

The goal is to determine at the 5% significance level, if group A students score higher than in group B students?

    1. State the null hypothesis and the alternate hypothesis.
    2. What is the critical value of the test statistic?
    3. What is the computed value of the test statistic?
    4. Decide using the critical value approach.
    5. Mention 2 assumptions that need to be made about the distribution of the differences?
    6. Do students in group B underperform those in group A? Do asking questions in increasing order of difficulty increase a student’s ability to answer them correctly? Justify numerically and practically. (carries good mark).

At the 0.01 significance level:

    1. State the null hypothesis and the alternate hypothesis
    2. What is the critical value of the test statistic?
    3. What is the calculated value of the test statistic?
    4. Make your decision using the critical value approach.
    5. What is the p-value? Decide with it
    6. Mention one assumption that needs to be made about the distribution of the differences?
    7. Is the change of government associated with the higher prices of residential homes? Justify practically (carries highest mark).