Week $6$ Discussion Topic: World Bank Data Set Descriptive Statistics and Sample Descriptions

This week's discussion topic allows you to continue with the second step in completing your Term Research Project for the course. In Week $6,$ you will complete the Methodology and Sample Description Section, which should include your descriptive statistics as well as your correlation matrix. Truly, if you did a really good job selecting your sample last week, this should not take that much time or effort.

First, if I notified you that you would need to make changes to your data selection, then select new variables accordingly. You should also clean up any mistakes you noticed in the written document if you have time. It will make the final week easier on you. Please keep all of your quantitative work on ONE excel book that you download from World Bank. I need to see the original data that you download, your cleaned data, your meta$-$data that was included in the download, and your calculations. This allows me to help you if you get off track.

Next, document the total countries that were included for all series in your dataset. You do not have to list this number for each series since each may be different; just count the number of observations in your initial table. Then, filter out the missing data as I showed you in the videos. Once you have applied $$listwise deletion$$ for all missing data, note how many were removed. Follow this up with your treatment for outliers. For simplicity, you might want to just address anything more than $3$ standard deviations away from the mean. Note how many outliers here noted and how the sample was affected. Make sure that you retained at least $100$ observations for your final sample size. If not, find replace variables with missing data with series that have higher response rates.

$***$Please note that you should not list every single country $$ I don$$t want to read that any more than you want to write it$.$ A simple statement like this one will be fine: $$The measurement items were obtained from the Word Bank with $162$ countries included in the dataset. Outliers and missing items were treated using listwise deletion. A total of $26$ countries were purged due to missing data, reducing the sample size to $136.$

$***$Make sure that you retained at least $100$ observations for your final sample size. If not, find replace variables with missing data with series that have higher response rates.

Finally, do the calculations for your correlation matrix in the Results section. You should write that first paragraph up and include the correlation matrix as a table for this week$$s discussion. From here, you can easily go ahead and run your regression if you want, but you can wait until the final paper to format and write up the results and provide a brief discussion.

$***$You will want to do your calculation for descriptives and your correlation matrix before you start writing all this up$.$ Make sure that you do not have to change variables due to low responses or multicollinearity. You don$$t want to have to write all of this multiple times.

I will provide a link to another video showing you how to complete these at the bottom.

You should complete and post these sections, and comment on at least $2$ other posts by April $21.$