Data Analysis Toolbox

So I am currently making my data analysis toolbox. This toolbox really helps me with my project because it makes me think of all of the aspects of it that I would need. The data analysis toolbox is basically questions about the who, what, when, where, and how of the data. The individuals (the whos) or the objects of my data are the customers that I serve. I will try to get as many customers as I could so I could get a more representative data sets. I hope that I could get around 300 to 350 customers. I already got about 100 customers already. The variables (the what) are how far does a person travels to downtown New Orleans. This variable is in miles. The data was gathered to find out how far does one travels to New Orleans. I want to present this data to the place in charge of Tourism. They could used this data to find out where they should advertise more about New Orleans in order to get more tourists in New Orleans. This data will be gathered from February 23 to March 21 on weekends and holidays(the when). It will be gathered at Cafe Du Monde (the where), a famous coffeestand in downtown New Orleans where there are lots of tourists. It will be gathered by me (the how) while I am waitressing. I will ask my customers where they are from. Since there is no available data for me to compare my results with, I will try to ask as many customers as possible. The data is from an observational study and it is only a sample data.

One particular problem with my data is its reliability. Even though I will have quite a large sample, my sample is not large enough compared to the amount of people that comes into New Orleans. There are thousands of customers that come into Cafe Du Monde every day. So I try to get as many people as possible and hope that my data will be representative enough. Also, my data is not yearlong. Different people come at different times. For example, when there is a big football game, there is a lot of people coming from the states of the football teams. So that there is one biased data. Also depending on what events going on, there are different people coming to each of the events. So I just hope that the data I gathered will not be too biased.

Experimental Design

Question: How far do tourists travels to New Orleans?

Objective: To find out about where most tourists come from.

Subjects: The customers at Cafe du Monde downtown. I will survey as many people as I could, especially during the Mardi Gras holidays.

Materials: Notepad

Laptop

Procedure: I will ask as many customers, hopefully more than 200 customers, where they come from. I will ask them if they knows how many miles is where they are from is from New Orleans. Then I will put it in Excel to graph it.

How far do people travel to New Orleans?

I choose this topic for my Statistics project because I think it would be interesting. I try to research up to about this topic, but I could not find any information on it. What I did find though was the number of visitors coming to New Orleans each year. I found it on a New Orleans Facts website. I spend some more time researching up my topic, but with no luck. I think my topic will be good for the Tourist Bureau because it will give them information about where did all of these visitors come from. So if there is not many visitors coming from, let say the Northwest of United States, then the Tourist Bureau could advertise about New Orleans there, in order to bring in more tourists for New Orleans. I also choose this topic because I think it would be easy for me, since I work in the French Quarter. I think it would be easy for me to ask people where they come from.