I believe the purpose of Project 1- Descriptive Statistics for Primary Data is to develop analytical thinking and skills. It gives us the chance to apply what we have learned, slowly mastering it. Even if one is a beginner in this field, it is a very suitable and effective way to learn and explore new things.
We were asked to choose topics to conduct our surveys. We were allowed to choose whatever topic we liked, which had piqued our interest in doing this project. However, there were some requirements on data type. For that, we had to think very carefully in creating the questionnaire in order to meet the requirements. My teammates and I created our questionnaire using Google Form, which is very user friendly. This process might seem to be extremely easy but in fact, we had to make sure we understood each of the data type. After creating questionnaire, we distributed our questionnaire through social media like Whatsapp. Fortunately, it took one week only to collect 100 responses from UTM students.
There were many challenges faced when it came to data analysis. First and foremost, never did I know cleaning data could be time-consuming. We had to modify the corrupt or inaccurate data to make sure they were useable. Inaccuracy of data could cause some problems in creating graphs and lead to incorrect representation of data.
Graphical representations took us the longest to decide in order to ensure the data presented could be understood well. Learning to use RStudio as a beginner was the biggest challenge I faced. There is a lot of packages in RStudio and each of them runs differently. Therefore, I made myself study some basics about it. I was clueless and found it hard to understand at first. After that, I tried to create some graphs using it. It was pretty frustrating when I failed to understand why the commands did not work. Nevertheless, it is undeniable that RStusio is, indeed, a powerful software and I am starting to like it. It can load various types of files with just a line of code and “Environment” in RStudio shows the data we have stored, which also helps us to interact with the data easily. What I like about it the most is we can create new filtered tabulated data from the data we have stored earlier, which is very convenient. This also brings the analytical performance to a higher level.
Furthermore, for the report, we had to make sure the main idea of our topic stood out and was delivered clearly. Data description must be detailed and provide important information. Moreover, video presentation was challenging. We organised and re-arranged everything, making sure there was enough material, in the hope of producing a video that would provide a good understanding with a good flow. Body language and quality of the video also needed much effort to be improved in order to impress the audience.
In conclusion, I truly appreciated the guidance from Dr. Sharin Hazlin Binti Huspi. The whole project was harder than I thought and had changed my point my view. There were many aspects that needed to be taken into consideration. I had learned a lot in terms of data analysis, visualisation and reporting. From which, I gain great satisfaction and I am looking forward to improving my analytical skills and exploring more in data analysis.