STATS1900 Business Statistics

Minor Assignment

Date Due: Refer to Course Description

Total Marks: 20 marks Worth: 10% of final assessment

This assignment requires an amount of computer work and written comment. You may need to seek guidance from your tutor along the way. Do not leave things until too late!! Each question carefully describes what you are required to do so please follow these carefully!

In this assignment you will examine employment data obtained through a survey of business school graduates undertaken by a university placement office. The data is contained in the file Survey_of_graduates.xls and contains the following columns (variables):

|Variable |Description |
| Area|Area of employment: 1 = Accounting, 2 = Finance, 3 = General management, |
| |4 = Marketing/Sales, 5 = Other |
|Gender |1 = Female, 2 = Male |
|Satisfaction |Job satisfaction: 4 = very, 3 = quite, 2 = little, 1 = none |
|Search |Number of weeks job searching |
|Salary |$thousands |
| | |

Random Sample: Before you begin your analysis you are required to take a random sample of size 150 from the 253 cases in the file. Use the file Sample-Generator-101.xls to do this. Your tutor will show you how this can be done in EXCEL. Your answers to the questions below are to be based on your sample of 150 cases. Make sure to keep a safe copy of your sample since you cannot use Sample-Generator-101 to reproduce the first sample. Provide a printout of the data in your sample, with ID numbers in ascending order.
Task 1: Variable List: Using the variables listed in the table above state for each variable whether it is qualitative or quantitative, if it is qualitative state whether it is nominal or ordinal, and if it is quantitative state whether it is discrete or continuous.

Task 2: Histogram: Create a histogram showing the distribution of salaries. Comment upon the shape of the distribution: is it symmetric? If it is not, is it positively or negatively skewed? Are there any outliers present? If so, are they of particular interest?

State which central measure would be best to use to describe the centre of this