Analysis Plan

Format

• Your Analysis Plan must be a PDF: what you use to write the report leading up to exporting to PDF is a group decision.
• Provide APA-style citations for each dataset and the other sources you cite.
• Have 20+ citations that are mostly peer-reviewed research papers: these should mostly appear as citations in the literature review portion of The Problem.
• The Analysis Plan should be 3-4 pages with an additional page of your references cited using APA style (and with DOIs whenever possible).
• Write the report as though your intended audience is an academic or a boss at work who really enjoys academic research.
• One group member submits for the entire group.

The Problem

Whenever you’re doing research, your aim is to understand how the data and the questions of interest fit into the world’s existing body of communal knowledge. We do this by performing a literature review of peer-reviewed research published on the same topic.

1. Problem description
   1. Discuss the problem's origin
   2. How it has progressed since its origin to present
   3. The impact of the problem and the good that could come from solving an aspect of it
2. Review of previous efforts to address the problem
   1. Discuss 2-3 previous attempts to 'solve' problem
   2. With each attempt, describe its merits + shortcomings

The Plan

In this section, you are essentially saying: we have decided to use these N modeling approaches, and here's why.

If every group member wants to perform their own analysis — that's great! Just keep in mind that each approach needs to perform all of the steps we would expect given what you've learned in the class (e.g, you perform X checks before and after your models, as shown in the class).

1. Your Approaches
   1. Name each approach with a subheader (e.g., Approach #1: Poisson Regression)
   2. In 2-3 paragraphs following the subheader, detail the model that will be explored, the outcome variables and the data sources (these need to be cited).
2. Rationale
   1. Describe why you think your approaches might succeed where previous attempts failed.
   2. Describe the challenges you anticipate may be encountered by your approaches.
   3. Describe at least 2 other approaches you considered and why you chose not to undertake those.