Assignment Guidance: Practicum I

Scenario:

You have been hired by the Obama Administration as the senior analyst to the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs. In this new position you have been asked to do an analysis of military hospital Bed Size. The administration wants to know if there is a difference between services insofar as bed size goes ?

You have been given the below MS Word file. The file contains two columns. In one column there is a list of hospitals and hospital names identifying the hospital as an Army, Navy or Air Force hospital. In the second column there is the number of beds in that hospital. The data was given to you sorted by hospital size (smallest to largest).

The choice of methodology is up to you. Based on the aforementioned research question you have enough material to select the appropriate statistical test and do an analysis based on class instruction.

In addition to selecting the appropriate statistical methodology, you must answer the following questions:

1. Is there a statistical difference in bed size within Army, Navy and Air Force hospitals? If there is a difference, what services are the same and which ones are different?
2. What is the sample size of each branch of service (Army, Navy and Air Force)? What is the total population size?
3. What is the total population of beds in each branch of service, and the population as a whole?
4. Discuss measures of central tendency of each branch of service, and the population as a whole
5. What issues (if any) do you see with this data? What issues do you see with controlling for error?
6. Use Excel (or SPSS) and do a bar graph of Bed Size for Army, Navy and Air Force hospitals. What does the bar graph suggest that may be different than the descriptive statistics you ran for the other questions (if anything is different).
7. Based on your answers to the aforementioned questions, do a 2 page write up (excluding tables and SPSS output) outlining your statistical analysis. Your analysis should include all the pertinent information necessary for you to describe your answers – as well as – capture all those items of interest covered in class (FYI, we covered a lot of items for various statistical tests, so its better to be verbose than to be too shallow – but do not go over 2-pages).

HINT: This is not too different than one of our homework assignments – and video lecture! You will first need to take the information below and copy and paste it into Excel. Once the data is in Excel you will be able to do some additional manipulation prior to importing the data into SPSS. Once the data is in SPSS, you will have to code and operationalize it in order to conduct the analysis.

Constraints: You are welcome to use each other as resources. Please feel free to post messages on the discussion board. HOWEVER, no one may trade answers, post public answers, or provide SPSS files to one another for analysis. You need to do all the coding and manipulation yourself, as well as, select the methodology on your own

Relevance: This is actually similar to something I was asked to do several years ago when I was still in the service and doing analysis for the Surgeon General. I think this data set and research question is actually very similar to the types of analysis and questions you will be asked to do in your own organizations in the future.

Good Luck!

Price: $17.34

Solution: The downloadable solution consists of 9 pages, 834 words and 2 charts.
Deliverable: Word Document