Introduction

By this stage you have already met a whole toolbox of statistical methods — ways of collecting data, classifying and tabulating it, presenting it through diagrams and graphs, and summarising it with measures of central tendency, dispersion and correlation. These tools are not merely classroom exercises; they are part of everyday economic life. Data on production, consumption, distribution, banking and insurance, trade and transport are constantly being gathered and analysed so that individuals, firms and governments can understand what is happening and decide what to do next.

This chapter shifts the focus from learning individual tools to putting them to work together on a real problem. The central idea is the project — a small, self-contained investigation in which you pick an economic question, design a way to answer it, gather the relevant information, process it with the statistical methods you already know, and finally write up what you found. In other words, a project is where collection, presentation, averages, variability and relationship all come together to serve a single purpose.

Why learn to build a project? Real economic questions rarely arrive neatly packaged. Consider a few situations you might realistically face:

• A producer wants to know how consumers feel about an existing product — say a particular soap, mobile phone or car — before deciding whether to change it.
• An entrepreneur is thinking of launching a new product or service and needs to know whether there is demand for it and at what price.
• A researcher wants to measure the spread of information technology in schools, or the level of consumer awareness, or a water or electricity problem in a locality.

In each case the answer cannot simply be looked up; it has to be produced by conducting a survey, organising the responses, and analysing them. Developing a project by conducting a survey and preparing a report teaches you exactly how to do this — how to turn a vague area of interest into a precise question, how to collect trustworthy information, and how to draw honest conclusions and suggest improvements in a product, scheme or system.

What you should be able to do after this chapter. The learning goals are twofold:

• to become familiar with the steps involved in designing a project — knowing, in the right order, what has to be decided and done; and
• to be able to apply the various statistical tools you have studied to analyse a problem, choosing the right average, the right measure of spread and, where appropriate, a measure of correlation.

The rest of the chapter first lays out the sequence of steps in making a project, then offers a suggested list of project topics drawn from real economic issues, and finally works through one complete sample project so that you can see every step — from framing the questionnaire to writing the concluding note — carried out in practice.