Assignment Task

This Assignment is in two parts:

1. Analysis of transcripts (qualitative data analysis)

2. Analysis of numbers (statistics or quantitative data analysis).

Part 1: Text (qualitative) data analysis

You will be provided with transcripts of four interviews with construction project managers about their work. The transcripts have been anonymised to protect the identity of the company, interviewees and interviewers. In these transcripts “education” and “power” refer to types of construction project.

The aim of the analysis is to understand what construction project managers’ work is like from their perspective. Analysis is always oriented towards answering research questions and/or testing hypotheses. The research questions for this part of the analysis task are:

1) What is a project manager’s job like (e.g. in terms of reporting practices, tasks and activities, and stakeholders)?

2) What do they like least and most about their work?

3) Why are they doing this job?

Structure your report appropriately, starting with a cover page, a contents page, an introduction, and ending with a conclusion. In your introduction, please clearly describe the technique you have used.

In a Methods section, describe how you applied the technique using the steps that you used. For example: familiarization, initial coding, codebook development, checking and finalizing coding and the codebook; forming data matrices.

Follow the Methods section with a Findings section in which you report The answers to the research questions. You should illustrate your report with selected quotations from the interviews (referenced to the source). Ensure that you move from the descriptive (i.e., what did the participant say?) to the interpretative level (i.e., what could this mean?).

Finally, close your report with a conclusion section to wrap up your ideas and bring the main threads of your argument together into a coherent whole.

You should submit two documents for this part of the assignment:

1. A Word document with the report (as described above)
2. An Excel spreadsheet with your working – coded transcripts, list of topics, initial codebook, final codebook, data matrix.

Part 2: analysing numbers (statistics / quantitative data analysis)

The data set was drawn from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC). You do not need to know anything else about this data set, but if you are interested you can find further information here: 

The research questions for this section are:

1. a) Is there a GDP 2020 class difference in the number of COVID cases registered?

1. b) Is there a difference between GDP class with regards to the number of first COVID-19 doses administered?

2. a) Is there an interrelation between the number of COVID cases and the number of tests done?

2. b) Is there an interrelation between the number of deaths and GDP (PPP) 2020?

2. c) Which of the variables are predictors of the number of deaths between COVID cases, GDP, the sum of tests done and first dose administered?

Quantitative data-analysis tasks

Start with a description of the study sample in terms of COVID characteristics registered in Europe in the period (January 2020 – March 2021) using descriptive statistics. After that, address the research questions above.

For each of the research questions above, you have to

• Select an appropriate inferential statistical technique to answer the research question.
• Do the Analysis.

Report the following:

(i) State your objective,

(ii) explain why you chose which inferential statistical technique,

(iii) present and explain the statistical result,

(iv) present appropriate descriptive statistics and graphical illustrations that help to understand the result,

(v) describe the finding in words (i.e., what does the statistical finding actually mean), and

(vi) interpret the finding (i.e., how could the finding be explained?).

You should submit two documents for this part of the assignment:

1. A Word document with the description and analysis
2. An Excel spreadsheet with your working.