Data & Research Methods Project
Project Description
The Data & Research Methods (DRM) Project is perfect for beginners who have never worked with a dataset before. This project will also be helpful for advanced data science students who have little experience working with data cleaning or survey building, desk research, or data visualizations. The focus of this project is the research process as a whole.
It is the first day of your new job as the Junior Data Scientist for the Office of the Mayor in the fictional town of Data Lake, West Dakota. The population of Data Lake (314,159) has grown rapidly since 2020 as a number of remote workers have relocated to the mid-size city. Mayor “Tess Ellation” has tasked your office with a project – to learn more about the specific needs of the town’s new remote work population. She asks you to review data on remote workers provided by the U.S. Census Bureau and come back to her with at least two data-driven policy recommendations which will support these new Data Lake families (for example, a policy recommendation might be: build new coworking spaces downtown). Your policy recommendations must be informed by data analysis or Mayor Ellation will not adopt them.
Together, we’ll clean a dataset, learn about the ethics of data science research, do some preliminary analysis, and develop a working hypothesis about the impact of remote work policies. We’ll build some simple data visualizations, test our hypotheses, write up a short conclusion, and prepare a final report for Mayor Ellation.
There are 9 Milestones in this project. There are several Tasks you need to complete within each Milestone. This project should take you no more than 30 hours to finish. Depending on your skill level, it may take you less time.
In this project, you will learn using a combination of videos, articles, and external data work in spreadsheets. Our team has provided you with several external links and resources which will supplement your learning.
Project participants who complete Milestones 1-9 in accordance with these instructions will receive a Certificate of Completion from the NSDC Project Team.
Dataset
Household Pulse Survey: Measuring Emergent Social and Economic Matters Facing U.S. Households
Relevant Skills You May Apply
No previous experience is required – some knowledge of Excel or Google Sheets may be helpful
Skills You May Gain
Research methodologies, Hypothesis development and testing, Data visualization, Data ethics, Professional scientific communications, Excel / Google Sheets data analysis
Total Time
30 hours or less – there is no deadline to complete this project.
Milestones
Document A: Introduction to Research Methods
Milestone 1: Preliminary Research (~2 hours)
Milestone 2: Finding & Sourcing Quality Data (~3 hours)
Milestone 3: Diving into the Documentation & Identifying Bias (~2 hours)
Document B: Exploring Data Analysis
Milestone 4: The Basics of Data Prep & Cleaning (~5 hours)
Milestone 5: Exploratory Data Analysis (~5 hours)
Document C: Independent Data Analysis
Milestone 6: Continued Analysis (~5 hours)
Milestone 7: Testing our Hypothesis (~4 hours)
Document D: Refining Data-Driven Conclusions
Milestone 8: Summarizing our Conclusions (~2 hours)
Milestone 9: Visualizing our Findings (~2 hours)
Deliverables
Final submissions should include completed copies of Documents A – D as well as a formatted datasheet (Excel or Google Sheets). These forms will include space for participants to share data visualizations and a written Executive Summary (ES) of their analysis.