Question 1 - 16 marks

This question is intended to assess your understanding of the use and interpretation of graphical and numerical summaries of data, data types, significance probabilities and confidence intervals, and your use of SPSS to obtain appropriate output. You should be able to answer this question after working through the Introduction to statistical modelling. In this question you will be required to supply SPSS output for parts (b), (d) and (f ) only. In parts (b) and (f ) you will need to edit the default SPSS plot, and you should include only the edited plots in your work. All SPSS output should be included in the body of your work at the relevant point, and you should include only what is relevant to the question and your answer. The Breeding Birds Survey is organized by the British Trust for Ornithology to monitor the relative abundance of different species of birds over time and in different areas of the UK. Each year, volunteers survey kilometre square sites at regular intervals, and note down the numbers of birds of each species that they observe on each occasion. In 2001, access to the countryside was restricted by a national outbreak of foot and mouth disease. The SPSS file rails.sav contains data on counts of coots and moorhens collected over the period 1994-2007. There are four variables: year, sites, coot and moorhen.

rails.sav [DataSet1] - IBM SPSS Statistics Data Editor File Edit View Data Transform Analyze Graphs Utilities Exter 00 SMMMMME AMMMMM year sites coot moorhen 1994 1569 319 474 N 1995 1747 417 543 1996 1920 402 482 1997 2195 359 426 1998 2311 418 484 1999 2395 516 582 7 2000 2301 492 552 8 2001 638 842 647 9 2002 2205 498 566 10 2003 2326 581 568 11 2004 2530 568 557 12 2005 2889 593 542 13 2006 3287 573 550 14 2007 3604 .495 561