Summarizing Data Findings
Imagine your vice president wants to better understand the media habits of consumers. You, being resourceful with data, conducted a survey to find out the media habits of consumers. Now you need to take the raw data and summarize and present your findings to the vice president.
Keep in mind and ask yourself:
– What findings would be of interest to the VP? Keep your audience in mind while compiling your information.
– How can you tell a story with the data?
Create a presentation (your choice of which tool you want to do it in – just make sure I can open it). The presentation should be at least 5 slides but no more than 10. Please do not just put 5 graphs on 5 slides and call it good. Think about the narrative and how you will communicate this information to the vice president. Be sure to apply data visualization best practices – select appropriate graphs, reduce clutter and make sure they are visually appealing, communicating what you want the VP to know. Also, pay attention to details: typos, formatting errors, etc. I can’t emphasize enough that you don’t want to throw 5 graphs in a presentation and leave it at that.
Important note: You do not have to include the responses to every survey question that was asked. This should not be one graph on a slide for each question that was asked. But think about how you can use different groupings to look at the data differently. For example, respondents included their age range. One way to look at the information could be to show trends by age range. This is one example. There are many ways the information could be categorized and grouped.
Be sure to clean up the data as needed. There were a few open form fill ins that respondents were allowed to free type responses into. You made need to categorize those responses. For example, for the question “Which news source do you use the most?” one of the responses is BBC News which is a specific news outlet and not a type of news outlet. You’ll want to take into consideration these kids of variations.
Do not start this assignment the day it is due. Good analysis takes some time. Sometimes my best ideas on how to tell the story come to me hours or days after I’ve started an analysis. They need some time to bake!
Assignments will be graded on:
5 points – completeness and effort. Were all elements included and thoughtful, strategic effort shown?
10 points – attention to detail and quality of writing – was the presentation free of typos, data mistakes, and grammar errors?
25 points – summarization of data – Was the data presented in a compelling and impactful way? Did it tell a story?
Survey questions and details: Media Use Survey Overview.pdf (Please find file attached below)
Survey responses: Media Use Survey (Responses).xlsx (Please find this file attached below)
To help you get started, it might be useful to create some pivot tables (you won’t be able to do this well on columns with multiple answers unless you create separate columns) to summarize some of the data sets.
