simple research analysis

simple quantitative research analysis for beginners

most of the people are stuck in the analysis part of the research usually, in my point of view its simple than data collection i am not an expert in the research and analysis, but i have searched for hours on data analysis, web have no simple explanation as i know for beginners. i try to explain it in simple form here.

first step of the analysis if you have any quantitative or categorical data (such gender) convert it to numerical terms, but mind it you cant run regression or correlation for it, but you can do descriptive analysis for that. for this i normally use mini tab, (data > code > text to numeric)

1. first finish the descriptive analysis for categorical data (for example male, race) simply you can insert a bar or pie chart and a frequency table to show how many males and females are included in your sample

2. go for numeric data ( such income, spend on food) to analyze this type of data individually can use scatter plot or tables ( for example income category and no of people)

3. then go for find relationship between two variables (as above i mention ) income and spending on food first run a correlation to check whether these two variables have any relationship, include a scatter diagram too.

if the relationship is exists only go for regression analysis. run the regression and see what is the change made by independent variable to dependent variable. if you end up with a equation like

             spend on food = 1200 + 0.2 . income

simply means that when income is equal to 0 even there will be 1200 spend, and when income increase by 1 spend on food will increase by 0.2.

don't forgot to check the p.value of the variables, normally if the p value is more than 0.05 the variable is not significant and also the r square will indicate dependent variable's variation explain by the independent variable if you have multiple regression (more than one independent variable)use adjuster r square, 60 % or more will be enough to tell that the model is valid.

if any one need further detail free free to comment i love to share