Question

Your University wish to determine how alcohol consumption patterns among students impact their GPAs. You and your classmates’ task (as a group) is to discuss and formulate a RESEARCH PROPOSAL, proposing how the research would be conducted, from start to completion, step-by-step, in order to ultimately produce a useful and dependable report that would guide the University in introducing positive measures that improve students’ academic qualities. Among many things, you and your classmates would definitely want to propose the inclusion of any descriptive statistics and tests that are useful in uncovering the relationship between alcohol consumption patterns and GPAs achieved.

Answer 1

For the given scenario, we want to find the relationship between the alcohol consumption pattern and the GPA of the students. For finding this relationship numerically, we need to collect the data for the students regarding information about their alcohol consumption patterns and GPA’s. Data collection should be done by using proper random sampling method and all types of biases should be avoided during data collection process. Sample size should be adequate for drawing conclusions for this research study. If the sample size is very small, we will get biased results. At least data should be collected for more than 50 students for getting reliable results. For the variable pattern of alcohol consumption, we would use ordinal level of measurement. Also, we can use ratio scale by considering the frequency of alcohol consumption in week. For the variable GPA, we use ratio level of measurement. After the process of data collection, we will find the descriptive statistics for variables, box plots for variables, correlation coefficient for both variables, and regression analysis for the prediction of dependent variable GPA based on the independent variable alcohol consumption, etc.

For checking the significance of the linear relationship exists between the given two variables, we can use t test for population correlation coefficient. Also, we can check the significance of the coefficients of regression equation by using corresponding t tests for population slope and intercept.

Finally, we can show that how alcohol consumption affects the GPA.