Problem Set 2 Learning to crawl 15 due midnight 7 October 2020
Working in teams of one to four people please consider this scenario You are employed as a junior statistician at Petit Poll a Canadian polling company Petit Poll has a contract with a Canadian political party to provide them with monthly polling updates
Please pick a political party that you are working for and pick a geographic focus 1 the overall election 2 a particular province or 3 a specific riding
Then decide on a survey methodology hint p 13 of Wu Thompson provides a handy checklist Some questions you should address include
○ What is the population frame and sample
○ What sampling methods will you use and why eg you could
choose SRSWOR stratified etc What are some of the statistical properties that the method brings to the table eg for SRSWOR you could discuss Wu Thompson Theorem 22 etc as appropriate
○ How are you going to reach your desired respondents
○ How much do you estimate this will cost
○ What steps will you take to deal with nonresponse and how will
nonresponse affect your survey
○ How are you going to protect respondent privacy
Remember to consider all of this in the context of your client for instance who would be more interested in Alberta ridings Bloc Québécois or the Conservatives Who likely has more money to spend the Liberals or the Greens
Develop a survey on a platform that was introduced in class Be sure to test it yourselves You will want to test this as much as possible maybe even swap informally with another group
Now release the surveys into the simulated field Please do this by simulating an appropriate number of responses to your survey in R Dont forget to simulate in relation to the survey methodology that you proposed Show the results and discuss your findings Everything must be entirely reproducible You may like to consider linking your survey responses with other data such as the census or GSS
Use R Markdown to write a PDF report about all of this Discuss your results and findings your survey design and motivations etc all of it You are writing a report that will eventually go to the client so you must set the scene and use language that demonstrates your command of statistical concepts but brings the reader along with you Be sure to include graphs and tables and reference them in your discussion Be sure
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to be clear about weaknesses and biases and opportunities for future
work
Your report must be well written You are allowed to and should use
mathematical notation but you must explain all of it in plain english Similarly you can and should use surveyssamplingobservational data terminology but again you need to explain it
Your report must include at least the following aspects title date authorship nontechnical executive summary introduction survey methodology results discussion appendices that detail the survey and references Your client has stats graduates working for it who need to be impressed by the main content of the report but also has people who barely know what an average is and these people need to be impressed also This is why your report should include a nontechnical executive summary In terms of length this would typically be roughly 10 per cent of the report It would be more detailed than an introduction but still at a high level
Your graphs must be of an extremely high standard
Check that you have referenced everything Strong submissions will draw
on related literature in the discussion and would be sure to also reference
those The style of references does not matter provided it is consistent
Via Quercus submit a link to your PDF report which is hosted on GitHub At some point in the introduction to your report you must provide a link to the GitHub repo where the code that you used for this assignment lives
Hint Comment Your Code Your entire workflow must be entirely
reproducible
Please work in public where it is at all possible If you have a personal
situation for not wanting your name to be public then please email me a request for this please do NOT reveal your personal situation to me just make the request and suggest a workaround
Please be sure to include a link to your survey in your report and screenshots of the survey in the appendix of your report
There should be no evidence that this is a class assignment
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