Quantitative Research Methods
“Analysing movies”
Main objective: To demonstrate ability to maintain a linked set of statistical investigations into what is really going on in the data, and to find/discover/invent fresh questions to be asked of it.
Assignment guidelines:
You are invited to produce a report, setting out the analyses of the attached dataset in no more than 1000 words*. You are encouraged to further research and expand the dataset developing insights into various issues hinted at in the existing data. Alternatively, you may decide to focus on a subset of the dataset explaining the reason for doing so.
The dataset contains various types of information for 89 movies.
Report content
1. Commence with an executive summary stating the focal question/objective of your analytical journey and key findings.
2. Continue explaining the analytical thread you followed. The rationale for analyses and the findings themselves should be cogently described, and where appropriate you should manifest critical awareness of alternative ways of analysis that you did not follow.
This part of the report should be well organized with Tables and Figures numbered and labelled, written clearly in simple English.
Although in principle, the investigation may be self-contained with no real need to read around about the context of the problem, you are free to do so.
3. Conclude with a set of questions that further analyses could have explored, preferably indicating the type of data that you would need for such endeavours.

*The word limit does not include references; everything else (e.g., Tables and Figures) is included.
Assignments will be evaluated in terms of:
Content (Competence in recognition and diagnosis of cues and issues identified in the dataset; quality and originality of analyses; critical discussion of themes and issues unveiled by the analyses)
Structure (extent of coverage, quality of integration) and
Presentation (Clarity of communication, creativity, referencing)