Personal Interests of Replication Paper

This project will be your choice of one of 2 options:

  1. Personal Interest Data Analysis
  2. Replication and extension Paper

Personal Interest Project Description

In this project, you will work to answer your own research questions. The primary goal of this project is to use the regression analysis in that you have learned in this course to answer your own research question.

The secondary goals of this project are to

  1. Give you practice learning how to ask a research question.
  2. Give you practice interpreting a research question into statistical methods.
  3. Give you practice learning apply statistical methods and computational techniques.
  4. Display the true complexities to working with real data and and an open ended question.

Replication and Extension Project Description

In this project, you will work to reproduce and extend a published research article. The primary goal of this project is to take a published research paper and to replicate all of the tables and statistical models, then to extend these models for your own research question.

The secondary goals of this project are to

  1. Give you practice learning how to evaluate published research.
  2. Give you practice interpreting a research question into statistical methods.
  3. Give you practice learning apply statistical methods and computational techniques.
  4. Display the true complexities to working with real data and and an open ended question.

Project Requirements

For the project, you must follow the schedule and meet certain technical requirements.

Here are the six steps to the project:

Pick a Paper or Data that you will be using.

You should pick a paper or data that is interesting to you. There are many data sources that you can consider.

If you want to replicate a paper, you should try to find a paper that has data available. Make sure the methods used in the paper are what is being used in this class.

If you are looking for papers to replicate here are some strategies that you could use:

Feel free to browse examples of papers that have been replicated by students in the past:

Get your plan approved.

Before you get too involved in this project you will submit a one page summary of:

  • What Project you plan to do.
  • What paper/data you plan to use.
  • Question of interest.
  • Ideas of what types of Analysis you will need to perform

This should be complete this by April 17, 2017. Include the following in this proposal:

  • Citation information for the paper/data.
  • List of main statistical methods used
  • List of datasets used Were these datasets collected via complex sample designs?
  • Summary of data availability and data access plan
  • Summary of code availability (may be helpful for replication paper)
  • Questions that you wish to answer above and beyond research
  • Short explanation for why you picked this paper/data

Analyze the data.

Begin to analyze the data. If this is for your own personal paper. You will need to consider the following:

  • Basic Summary Statistics
  • Univariate Models
  • Multiple Regression models.
  • Figures that are useful.

If you are replicating a paper, you will need to follow the analysis that the other paper did, replicate all tables and figures.

You should have this done by May 1, 2017.

Write up your analysis.

Personal Interest Question

If this is a paper for your own personal research question you should have this paper look similar to most journal articles. For a better idea of this consider:

Replication of Paper

If your goal is to reproduce a paper. You need to reproduce the results exactly. You should be able to re-create every table and graph in the paper. Focus on the replicating the content of the tables and not the layout.

Begin your replication by creating a document with images of each table and each figure. Next, add the parts of the text where the authors describe how the results were generated. Finally, create code that reproduces the results. This document will be highly structured. For example,

  • Image of Table 1
  • Text describing how Table 1 was created
  • Your code to reproduce Table 1

Use the structure described below:

Remember you should somehow extend or improve the paper you are reproducing. Here are some examples of how you could do that:

  • create different visualizations of their data and results.
  • extend the analysis by using different methods or asking different questions.
  • re-run the same analysis on completely different data.
  • take an old paper and update the analysis with newer data.

For more help you can read this paper by Gary King

Suggested Replication further reading:

Schedule

Date Item Due
04/17/2017 Proposal Due
05/01/2017 Most of Analysis Should be done
05/18/2017 Final paper Due