Many of the groups that I met with today have chosen a research question that genuinely interests them, and I believe this is an extremely important aspect of any project that you wish to excel in. When students, or any researchers for that matter, are interested to a topic, they generally seem more willing to put in extra time and energy to produce noteworthy results. Additionally, most groups seemed to have a good grasp on the intuitive relationships between their predictor variables and their response variable. I believe this will also be useful for accuracy checks during the project.
One group had a combination of cross-sectional and time series data, which would be outside of the scope of this group project. Further, our own group hadn’t taken into account using only a subset of data. We were much more focused on meeting the 100 data point sample size requirement that we forgot to take into account that our sample was indeed an entire population. We have since changed topics.
The most essential part of this project is finding a reliable and sizeable data source. With this is mind, it might be easier to base your topic around what data is available rather than picking a topic and trying to find a data source that may or may not exist. It’s great to have a very interesting and thoughtful research questions, but if there isn’t any data to analyze, the question will remain a question with no feasible answer.
I’m intrigued and excited for the formality of this group project with opportunities to present, defend, revise, submit, resubmit and so-on. Too often as students, we do some and turn it in with little opportunity to interact with the learning process besides reviewing our graded assignment or test and seeing what we did wrong. I think this project will provide us some great insights and experiences in the revision process. Another thing that I really like about this project is the results can be life-changing (probably not, but maybe). Although most of our topics have been analyzed in the past (that’s why there’s data), the conclusions of our findings will hold true value to many individuals.