The Gallup Organization provides market research and consulting services around

Question

The Gallup Organization provides market research and consulting services around the world. Gallup pub- lishes the Gallup Poll, a widely recognized barometer of American and international opinion. The Gallup website provides access to many recent Gallup studies. Although a subscription is needed to access the entire site, many articles about recent Gallup Poll results can be accessed free of charge. To find poll results, go to the Gallup home page (http://www.gallup.com/) and click on the Gallup Poll icon or type the web address http://www. galluppoll.com/ directly into your web browser. The poll results are presented using a variety of statistical sum- maries and graphics that we have learned about in this chapter.

a. Go to the Gallup Organization website and access several of the articles presenting recent poll results. Find and print examples of some of the statistical summaries and graphics that we studied in this chap- ter. Then write a summary describing which statisti- cal methods and graphics seem to be used most frequently by Gallup when presenting poll results.

b. Read the results of a Gallup poll that you find to be of particular interest and summarize (in your own words) its most important conclusions. Cite the statistical evidence in the article that you believe most clearly backs up each conclusion.

c. By searching the web, or by searching other sources (such as newspapers and magazines), find an exam- ple of a misleading statistical summary or graphic. Print or copy the misleading example and write a paragraph describing why you think the summary or graphic is misleading.

Explanation / Answer

(You have not mentioned what techniques have been discussed in class, so I assume you are aware of simple average and line plots)

Though there are plenty of statistical methods that can be used in business data analytics, but it is often found that the most simple measures prove useful, e.g. a Time series plot of data which is essentially a line plot and also a simple average of different population measures.

Lets look at the first report I found on Gallup website. Statistics study is a very recent development and has brought about AI (Artificial Intelligence) which can be fed into robotics to work for human work force. Hence the human resource industry is facing a lull. This report is present on the Gallup website under heading "Are Millenials facing job cut due to AI?". The study takes up different segment of industries where there is a good presence of AI and also a handsome population of Milenials. The study compares the same position between Millenials (Ones who joined jobs at the turn of the millenium against the ones who are GenX. The study shows that the Millenials are at the highest risk of getting job cuts. The analysis uses simple average technique in stratified sampling. So it has stratified the sample into 3 parts of riskiness towards job cuts - low, medium and high and within each segment has calculated the proportion of Millenials v/s GenX. So this is an e.g of stratified sampling and mean within strata. It clearly shows that the high risk population has more density of Millenials. So Gallup most frequently uses the simple average in different strata to highlight their findings.

Reference Link: http://news.gallup.com/businessjournal/211799/trends-disrupt-workplace-forever.aspx?g_source=GALLUPANALYTICS&g_medium=topic&g_campaign=tiles

b) Also, lets go through the study which claims that in US, 45% people claim they have tried Marijuana. Here there are 3 distinct analysis done. First a Line plot which clearly shows that the Marijuana trying population is increasing over the time. The line plot is steeply increasing. Reference link : http://news.gallup.com/poll/214250/say-tried-marijuana.aspx?g_source=CATEGORY_DRUGS_AND_ALCOHOL&g_medium=topic&g_campaign=tiles. The second and third measure is stratified sampling and simple average within each strata, which takes 3 possible stratification strategy - gender wise and Income-class wise and lastly age-wise. Each show that there is an alarmingly high rate of people having tried marijuana. However we see some trends within strata, e.g high age people have relatively low tendency towards Marijuana. High income people have higher tendency towards Marijuana. The overall trend however is best depicted by the line plot and it is ususally one of the most effectiive measures because graphical interpretation is always easy to catch than a table of numbers.

(C) Lets consider the first example. Gallup claims that Millenials are always at risk of losing job to AI. But there is no mention of which jobs AI is targetting. It just says that wthin the industry that can be replaced by AI, there the Milennials are going to lose jobs.However what percentage of the total industry will be affected by AI, there is no mention of it. Now if the industry that can be replaced by AI is say 10% of the total work industry, then even if 50% of milennials are in risk of losing job in that industry, there is risk in the remaining of the 90% industry. So it is an example where the base of the study .i.e the base population comparison with the total population has not been made. Always while doing an analysis a mention should be made of the target population and its relation to the entire population, otherwise the reader fails to rasp the importance of the survey.

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