Ch 8Use of Statistical Tools — Class 11 Economics, concept-first.

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 m…

A good project is built in an orderly way. Rather than plunging straight into collecting information, you move through a definite sequence of steps, each of which prepares the ground for the next.

The very first step in any project is to be completely clear about what you want to study. Everything that follows — the people you approach, the questions you ask, the data you collect and the way yo…

Having fixed what you want to study, the next decision is whom to study. The target group is the specific set of people — or households, firms, shops, and so on — on whom you will focus your attention…

Once you know what you are studying and whom you are studying, you must decide how to obtain the information — and then actually collect it.

Data as they first arrive from a survey are raw — a heap of individual responses that, on their own, reveal very little. Before they can be analysed they must be organised and presented.

With the data organised and presented, the project reaches its analytical heart. Analysis and interpretation means applying the statistical tools you have studied to extract meaning from the tabulated…

The conclusion is the final analytical step of the project — the point at which all the earlier work is brought together into clear, defensible statements.

The bibliography is the closing section of a project, and though it comes last it is far from a formality.

To help you get started, the book offers a set of ready project ideas, each built around a real economic issue.

The chapter now walks through one complete sample project so that you can see every step applied together.

The situation. Project X is a young entrepreneur who wants to set up a factory to make toothpaste, and you have been asked to advise him on how to proceed.

The sample project uses a fifteen-item questionnaire designed to capture exactly the information listed for the study — the respondent's background, their current toothpaste use, their preferences, an…

This section shows how the responses gathered in the sample toothpaste project are organised, analysed and interpreted to produce the final report.

This is how the toothpaste survey's findings are pulled together into a simplified project report. Each item is a small table drawn from the questionnaire answers, followed by the observation it suppo…