Featured Project: The Davies Project
Check out this article written by Connor Moore and Suzie Shin about one of our previous QMSS 451 projects working with The Davies Project!
The Davies Project did not have a set goal in mind when they started working with Dr. Beth Ann Whitaker and QMSS 451 students, but they knew they needed compelling data about the needs in their community and how The Davies Project was acting to serve them. This led to two working projects for student groups. With the help of Dr. Whitaker, students in one group identified a publicly available dataset that they analyzed to identify significant trends in illness, pediatric care, and transportation challenges. These data could be used to support future funding applications or sponsorships. The second group used sensitive internal data from The Davies Project to create an interactive dashboard for their website that included metrics on their clients and the services they provided.
Examples of past QMSS 451 projects:
Students located publicly-available data on the incidence of different health challenges and health care access challenges for different populations at the county, state and national level. The client was provided with data files and data visualizations for use in grant proposals.
Students created a dashboard from the the client’s spreadsheet-based, live database of services provided. The dashboard allows the client to see real-time key metrics on their activities and client base.
Students updated an outdated key benchmark report that provides a comparative profile of the environment where the client operates. This involved locating and accessing many publicly available large datasets from both government and industry, drilling down into those datasets for city and MSA level data, creating appropriate descriptive statistics from those data, creating and updating visualizations of the metrics, and then analyzing and writing up discussion of changes since the previous report. Students also proposed and developed several new metrics that were added to the benchmark report.
Students conducted statistical analyses on survey data that the client organization had gathered but not yet fully explored. An analysis plan was developed to focus on the client’s specific strategic questions, and it resulted in the delivery of cleaned data files and a presentation, including discussion and visualizations, of findings.
Students conducted a text analysis of a Reddit discussion thread by a target population of the client organization. Students scraped the data from the website and were able to identify the frequency with which posters discussed the different challenges that the client organization’s product addresses and the current strategies that posters indicate they employ to face those challenges. The project resulted in delivery of data file, computer code that the client can re-use to repeat the scrape and analysis in the future, and a presentation of findings including discussion and visualizations.
