Quantitative Methods in Business Research

Question: Discuss about the Quantitative Methods in Business Research. Answer: Introduction: The objective of this part is to ascertain as to how many hours from the estimated unit workload of 150 hours would be spent on the relevant MYSCU site for the concerned unit. In order to opine on this, a sample data has been collected consisting of 65 observations. In order to compute the characteristics of the data relating to central tendency and dispersion, the summary statistics as highlighted below have been computed. It is apparent from the above table, that there is a vast difference between the mean and median of the given sample data which may be attributed to the presence of rightward skew of 1.15 as highlighted above (Eriksson and Kovalainen, 2015). The presence of skew is also validated from the frequency histogram indicated below. It is apparent that there is high variability in the responses recorded which is indicated from the high value of standard deviation in comparison with mean which is indicative the hours dedicated to MySCU is primarily driven by the underlying interest and driven from the students. Clearly, there seems be no compulsion from the University in this regard which has resulted in the high variation of data (Hillier, 2006). The result of this student driven behaviour is that there is presence of extreme values in the data which tends to distort the mean and make it an unreliable measure to indicate the central tendency of the sample data collected. Also, the data distribution is such that the underlying probability distribution is apparently non-normal. Evidence in this regards is provided by the presence of high degree of positive skew along with the unequal values of the measures of central tendency i.e. mean, median and mode. In order to estimate the average hours of relevant unit that an average student could be assumed to spend on the MySCU site would be equal to the median of the sample data (Flick, 2015). Although mean is perhaps a more popular measure of central tendency, but in the given case, median is more suitable. The mean represents incorrect information which has been influenced by the inclusion of certain extreme values which ideally should have been filtered. The mean value of 19.66 hours represents that 50% of the respondents spent a time of less than or equal to 19.66 hours on the MYSCU site for this unit. Hence, in the given case also, it would be fair to conclude that the requisite data is the median value based on the results already computed (Hastie, Tibshirani and Friedman, 2011). Therefore, a statistically reasonable measure of the average time spent by a random student on MYSCU website would be 19.66 hours which may change as the same is driven by student preferences. References Eriksson, P. and Kovalainen, A. 2015,Quantitative methods in business research. London: Sage Publications. Flick, U. 2015,Introducing research methodology: A beginner's guide to doing a research project. New York: Sage Publications. Hastie, T., Tibshirani, R. and Friedman, J. 2011,The Elements of Statistical Learning.New York: Springer Publications. Hillier, F. 2006, Introduction to Operations Research.New York: McGraw Hill Publications.