Research Project Reflection

Darion Bevan What challenges did you face in completing the assignment? How did you address them? One of the biggest challenges we faced while completing this project was finding the best way to summarize and organize our data. There were a lot of variables and confounding factors that played a role, such as: Riders who were disqualified, Riders that did not show up, and Riders who hit barrels during their races. We also had to search through the data to make sure the starting positions of the riders matched up with what we thought. With our data we had quite a few outliers in the data and we had to determine how to adjust to this factor as well Ultimately what we did was organize our data in three different ways: With all raw data present, with DQs removed and hit barrels removed, and with DQs removed and hit barrels adjusted. In the end we decided to run our analysis on the data with the DQs removed and hit barrels adjusted as this gave a clearer picture of what was truly going on. Our next challenge was analyzing our data with all outliers present or removed, as these gave very different Pvalues from the ANOVA test. We found it best to remove all outliers and conclude that we should reject the null hypothesis and conclude that at least one positions mean was different than the others.

What impact did this project have on your understanding of statistics? This project really helped me see the big picture of this statistics class, making the concepts more relevant to me. It mainly helped me understand the thinking that must go on before you do any actual data collection or analysis. You really have to make sure you know what you will be doing and that you meet the criteria necessary to make your conclusions meaningful. For us we had to figure out how to collect and organize our data in such a way that it would be random and we would have an appropriate amount of samples to perform our tests. Had we just gone and collected data without doing back round research, we would not have been able to understand or make the conclusions we had. Finally it helped me see that statistics can be of great value in both science, business and all other fields. Being able to make tests and perform analysis is a very valuable skill to have to can benefit any potential field one decides to go into. It can truly help bring validity to statements or ideas that may be obscure or unproven at first, such as if a position in a barrel race is impactful on the results.