Descriptive Analysis
Descriptive studies are carried out to understand the profile of any organization that follows certain common practice. For example, one may like to know or be able to describe the characteristics of an organization that implement flexible working timing
- PDF / 830,865 Bytes
- 39 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 67 Downloads / 239 Views
Descriptive Analysis
Learning Objectives After completing this chapter, you should be able to do the following: • Learn the importance of descriptive studies. • Know the various statistics used in descriptive studies. • Understand the situations in management research for undertaking a descriptive study. • Describe and interpret various descriptive statistics. • Learn the procedure of computing descriptive statistics using SPSS. • Know the procedure of developing the profile chart of a product or organization. • Discuss the findings in the outputs generated by the SPSS in a descriptive study.
Introduction Descriptive studies are carried out to understand the profile of any organization that follows certain common practice. For example, one may like to know or be able to describe the characteristics of an organization that implement flexible working timing or that have a certain working culture. Descriptive studies may be undertaken to describe the characteristics of a group of employees in an organization. The purpose of descriptive studies is to prepare a profile or to describe interesting phenomena from an individual or an organizational point of view. Although descriptive studies can identify sales pattern over a period of time or in different geographical locations but cannot ascertain the causal factors. These studies are often very useful for developing further research hypotheses for testing. Descriptive research may include case studies, cross-sectional studies, or longitudinal investigations. Different statistics are computed in descriptive studies to describe the nature of data. These statistics computed from the sample provide summary of various measures. Descriptive statistics are usually computed in all most every experimental research J.P. Verma, Data Analysis in Management with SPSS Software, DOI 10.1007/978-81-322-0786-3_2, # Springer India 2013
29
30
2 Descriptive Analysis
study. The primary goal in a descriptive study is to describe the sample at any specific point of time without trying to make inferences or causal statements. Normally, there are three primary reasons to conduct such studies: 1. To understand an organization by knowing its system 2. To help in need assessment and planning resource allocation 3. To identify areas of further research Descriptive studies help in identifying patterns and relationships that might otherwise go unnoticed. A descriptive study may be undertaken to ascertain and be able to describe the characteristics of variables of interest, in a given situation. For instance, a study of an organization in terms of percentage of employee in different age categories, their job satisfaction level, motivation level, gender composition, and salary structure can be considered as descriptive study. Quite frequently descriptive studies are undertaken in organizations to understand the characteristics of a group or employees such as age, educational level, job status, and length of service in different departments. Descriptive studies may also be undertaken to know the ch
Data Loading...
