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Running head: INTEPRETATION OF SURVEY RESULTS 1

intepretation Of Survey Results

Sandy Pennington

Capella University

Statistical Reasoning

MAT-FP2001

Ulrich Hoernsch

August 2015

Interpretation

INTEPRETATION OF SURVEY RESULTS 2

intepretation Of Survey Results

In this research I opted to study and check the student feelings toward the institution. As

expected a number of individuals apply to join Capella University but unfortunately not all are

always allow to join. Some try to send their joining application requisition forms as most as 3 to

even 4 or 5 times before their applications are accepted. I decided to find out how the students

were accepted on their first application or they had to do subsequent application before being

accepted into the University.

I also to check on the whether the students were really enjoying their time at the school. This was

necessitated by the fact that while others might have joined Capella University as a result of their

own passion and vision; others were forced to join by forces beyond their own strength. This

might be family ties with the institution, fathers’ placement of the University position or even

forced by an elder sibling whom went through the institution and turned out successful.

However, being part of the institution does not imply that all those schooling within the environs

of Capella are enjoying their stay. That was part of the reason why I thought it good to make an

enquiry of how they felt being part of the institution.

As a student one knows when they are growing professionally by checking their current

knowledge base with what they were or had previously. This is anchored on many factors one of

them being the competency of the staff taking them through their academics. I decided to ask the

students whether they felt the academic life at Capella was making a significant difference to

their professional lives and if they felt the staff were competent enough to see them through their

college life and help them advance to professional life.

Interpretation

often

some

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All these were meant to help me get a better view of the student feelings about their university

and suited they felt they were. Part of the questions were how long they thought they would stay

before landing a Job they moment they were through with college life and how long they had

already in school. The students had contradicting feeling about the time they expected to get a

job. While some were optimistic seeing only less than year, the skeptical ones felt they would

wait up to 5 years before they would get one.

Population and Sample

The study revolved around the current students who were in session at Capella University. The

school has more than 2,000 students and as results I couldn’t have been able to interview each

and every person. This was due to limitation of time and resources required to carry out such a

survey. As a result I decide to use a proportion of the entire student fraternity to act as my

sample. My sample size consisted of 40 students. According to the Central Limit Theorem, as a

sample size increases, it tends towards the mean of the population and therefore can be used to

generalize the sample (R.Saleem, 2009). To ensure that our sample used in this survey was

unbiased, I decided to use simple random sampling to choose the individuals to be survey.

Moreover, since the questions in the survey were not skewed towards any faculty, the responses

were bound to get unbiased.

Method

The data to be used in this survey was found with the help of a data-generating calculator. This

ensured that the responses were not biased and they were completely random (Smart, 2012). The

data might not reflect the actual feeling on the ground but were meant to help for academic

so

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purposes. The data was bound to either tally with what was actually happening at Capella, or be

the exact opposite either way the deviation would not come as a surprise.

Parameters and statistics in the study

In any given study the parameter would be used to describe the population while the statistics

would be used to describe the sample (Woods, 2011). The sample in this case would represent

only a fraction of the population. The response from this sample would be a representative of the

entire school and the findings can be used to generalize.

Margin of error and the Confidence Interval

According to Boddy & Smith, they defined the confidence interval as the measure of how

accurate given observations is from the mean. The confidence interval is seen as a range of

values from the central or means value. The margin of error is taken as the level of precision that

is acceptable. It is determined by the sample size, which in this case was 40 and the level of

confidence which was 95%. For this study the margin of error varied with the standard deviation

of each question that we were investigating.

Interview Questions

The research was based on a questionnaire that had 6 questions. Of these 6 questions, 4 of them

were binary questions requiring only a Yes or a No as a response. This helped avoid open

responses to them. The final two questions were quantitative in nature requiring only a numerical

answer to fill them. These were open though the responses were to be strictly numerical in

nature. There was a floor and ceiling for these responses therefore any responses were not

expected to go beyond this range.

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The questions used in this survey were;

1. Are you enjoying you Academic life at CAPELLA UNIVERSITY?

2. Were you called for the Course you had wished to enroll in during your first Attempt?

3. Do you feel you are professionally advancing towards your career using your current

course at CAPELLA University?

4. Is the Staff at Capella University accomplished enough to see you through your college

to a professional in your field?

5. How long have you been at Capella University?

The questions were objective and relevant and had I ask the students it would give a good

picture of how the students were feeling about the school.

Conclusion

Though the findings would be meaningful for each question I would be trying to answer,

the data generated by the random data generator could only be used as a dummy data.

However, if I was to draw conclusions from it then it is evident that from the data

generated we can see that 0.625 of the students are actually enjoying their stay at Capella

University.

We were also able to see that 45% of the student had been called the first time they

applied for the course they had wished for. 57.5% of the students felt they were making a

head through professionally while at Capella University and 55% of the student

population that was interviewed felt that Capella University were accomplished enough

to see them through the system and advance professionally. On average, students at

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Capella University for 4 years with some staying longer and others having a much shorter

stay.

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References

R.Saleem. (2009). Simplified Statistics. Nairobi: Longhorn Publishers.

Smart, T. (2012). Statistics for psychology Students. Kansas: Advenrud Sparks.

Woods, F. (2011). Statistics made Easy. New jersey: Bronx publishers.