Statistics Paper Researcher_D

Team C

January 25, 2016

Data Collection

Ballard Integrated Managed Services, Inc. (BIMS) is facing an uptick in hospital complaints, low morale and time waste, and an increasing annual employee turnover in the past four months above the national average of 55 to 65%. This increase in turnover has not been a challenge to fill, but increases the financial impact of all areas required in order to bring a new hire on board. As manpower is the largest part of any companies’ expenses, it is imperative to find the root cause of employee distention and turn it around.

Data Collection Instrument

BIMS has authorized a population wide, voluntary, and anonymous survey that will be given to employees with their paychecks to make sure or 100% delivery derived by HR manager Debbie Horner. Mrs. Horner hypothesizes that by finding out employee satisfaction levels in key areas such as working conditions, shift hours, quality of training, level of compensation, fair treatment, internal communications, and job security a correlation can be determined to find a root cause for action. The survey instrument was devised in an effort to permit the employees to articulate their opinions about their experiences at BIMS.

Types of Data

The survey will have both qualitative and quantitative data as it will ask how employees feel about certain areas (qualitative), and how many days they use for sick leave (quantitative). The surveys were added to pay statements in hopes that the population responded in its entirety, but since it was voluntary only 17.3% responded making it a sample representation that we may use for inferential statistics. This survey return rate is quite good as most have an 11% return rate for most surveys that are voluntary (Powers).

Levels of Measurement

BIMS used nominal, ordinal, and interval levels of measurement during the exit interview data collection process and the initial employee survey. At the nominal level BIMS tallied and categorized the amount of observations for the measurements. Primarily, BIMS used ordinal levels of measurement to catalog the residual information by groups of labels that have been given relative values. An ordinal scale of measurement represents an ordered series of relationships of rank order ("Introduction to Measurement and Statistics", n.d).  A measurement that was used to calculate the employee’s length of service with the company was the interval level of measurement. BIMS converted each employee’s complete time of services from years and months into months (University of Phoenix, 2016).

Data Coding

To describe the nominal, ordinal, and interval data, the BIMS staff used numeric codes.

The data is organized and assessed to evaluate the procedures that were implemented. Descriptive statistics were used to present a profile of the data, containing means, median, and mode, to define the average of the group’s ratings. With the use of ordinal measurements, BIMS staff can use mode, the most common value, or median, the middle ranking, to determine the central tendency.

Data Scrub

It is imperative that the information that was obtained be scrubbed and reviewed for accuracy. By overviewing the information for data that was simply left out (those who failed to deliver a reply to a survey question) an in-house verdict was made to place a zero for any question that was unanswered.

There are many of these particular inaccuracies in the sample data. There are a total of 5 zeros found in the demographic questions and 18 zeros located in questions one through ten. Also there seems to be a keystroke error. Throughout the survey there was a discovery of an invalid value of ‘6’ found for a total of six times within questions one through ten. (University of Phoenix, 2016).

Conclusion

In an attempt to obtain an overview of the employees opinion on working conditions, shifts, training, payment, equal opportunity, etc. The BIMS survey was presented to all 449 employees. The primary focus of the survey team was to present their leadership, reliable statistical data that reveals the primary elements that would settle the continuous rise of worries over employee morale. Generally, the survey method was not as effective and produced subpar results, with only 78 employees responding out of the 449. Totaling less than an 18% participation rate (University of Phoenix, 2016).

Reference Page

Introduction to Measurement and Statistics. (n.d). Retrieved from

http://faculty.webster.edu/woolflm/statwhatis.html

Powers, D. (2015). Integrated Services Data Collection. Unpublished manuscript, University of

Phoenix.

University of Phoenix. (2016). Ballard Integrated Managed Services, Inc., Part 1. Retrieved from

University of Phoenix, QNT/351 website.