Introduction and Hypothesis
For this portion of the report, write a brief introduction to your topic/market, provide your research questions that you will investigate, and a clear hypothesis statement predicting the outcome of those research questions. Explain your current gap in knowledge that led to the research questions. Describe your personal experiences with the market along with any unique knowledge that you have which aided the formation of the research question. You do not need to have any researched background knowledge for this first lab report. Form a clear hypothesis or statement of expectation based on your own experience with the market.
Before looking at the data, form a clear hypothesis about some area of the market. Start by forming a clear research question. What exactly are you curious about? What do you hope to understand better and why are you motivated to perform the research? For example, have you assumed the market is declining because you observed a change in people’s preferences or behaviors? Do you wish to confirm your assumption?
Then make a clear hypothesis statement that outlines your expectations. For example, do you expect it to be a growing market or declining one? Is there a certain demographic of the consumer population that you would expect to be well represented in the market? How much revenue do you expect to see in the market? These would be part of your research questions. Your hypothesis would be a declarative statement that you could then test by investigating the market data. Please be sure to write your hypothesis statement clearly in your report.
Experiment
Once you are on the site, roll over “Outlooks” on the top bar, and then click on the market outlook depending on the category of your chosen market related to your research question (country outlooks should not be used for this assignment). You will see a list of major markets. Each market is subdivided into smaller markets. Look through the different market outlook data sets until you find one that is closest to the market that you chose. Try to find some demographic indicators in the data (age, income, gender etc.). You can download the picture using the PNG button on the left. You will also notice that citations for the data are available via button on the left. Be sure to retrieve the APA reference for your reference page at the end. You also have an overview of what the data means via text on the left. You may use that, but it must be in quotation marks. Otherwise, you can paraphrase it in your own words.
For this portion of the report, briefly describe the process you used to collect the data (a brief paragraph will do).
Results and Interpretation
Once you have your data downloaded and put into a document, do a brief analysis of what the data tells you. How does it inform you? What does this data tell consumers? What does it tell industry? What does it tell investors? Think carefully about the values and what they mean.
For example: If I look at consumption of Smart Home digital goods, I notice that the largest demographics of purchases are men, ages 25-34, and high income brackets. That should give me a good idea of where the greatest potential target market is. Further to that, if I look at market penetration in this category I can see that it has almost doubled in 2 years, indicating an area of opportunity for growth if a new product were to be introduced at this time.
Smart Home (Links to an external site.)
For this portion of the report, display the data tables/graphs from Statista in the report directly as images and provide some written interpretation of the data that helps the reader understand how the data informs the student and helps to answer the research questions. Be sure to provide citations for the source of data under each chart/graph (and don’t forget your full reference list at the end of the report as well).
Conclusion
Once you have displayed and discussed the data, revisit your hypothesis. Use your interpretation of the data to support or disprove your hypothesis. Make a declaration as to whether or not the hypothesis was somewhat, mostly, or completely supported by the data and explain why. Discuss your initial research questions and then address how your understanding changed by performing this lab.
For this portion of the report, provide a brief paragraph addressing all the items above.
Discussion (Future Studies)
Supply some future research questions based on anything related to this lab. Think carefully about what you learned and what you don’t fully understand yet. Suggest a new research question on the subject area that you haven’t investigated or don’t understand yet. What else is there to find out?
For this portion of the report, provide one paragraph of writing discussing potential future studies on your subject.
The lab report should have a word count of 200-400 words along with supporting data images/graphs. Citations should be provided throughout the document with a properly formed reference page in APA format. Submissions will be run through Turn It In for a plagiarism check. Be sure to paraphrase any verbiage that comes from a source.
