Right at the top of this post, I'd like to take a step back and thank you, our readers, for continuing to stay with us as we evolve and come up with new ideas.  What began with Blue Leader and me ranting about our experiences working in data and analytics is slowly growing into a strong, six person team of people with diverse points of view, ideas and approaches to solving problems. And as we move forward and develop our ideas, we look back at other things that we tried and realize that we may have to tinker with the ideas a bit.

This is one of those moments.

In Part 3 of this series, I wrote:

We now get further into the role-playing aspect of this series. Let's pretend that you're trying to design a polling strategy for a Democratic Congressional candidate running for an open seat in the state of Mississippi. It is going to be in time for the 2008 elections, and not a special election.  You are the campaign manager, and it's your job to figure out what you need to do with the polls.  You have no primary opponent, and are able to begin running against the Republican from day one.  In fact, your candidate had an exploratory committee up and going by March 07, and declared his intentions for the seat in June 07.  The Republican incumbent of fourteen years is retiring, and they're facing a primary of three candidates.  Their primary is not going to be messy and fun. It's going to have the party leadership step in and make their executive decisions, so you'll be running against someone by January 08.

This was a bad framework, as it involved a real race with real candidates, dynamics, etc.  Instead, what we are going to do is simulate a complete dummy poll.  Let's imagine that we are a polling firm, Determination Services, Inc., and that we are doing a poll for The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.  The situation? Their primary customer base is turning into baby boomers and senior citizens, and they want to know what these people think about recent directions, programs and inductions into the Hall. THey also want to know what kinds of initiatives that the Hall can undertake to shore up their base of support from these two demographics, given the volatile economy and changing climate of popular culture. What do we do?

This simulation is going to be the new focus of the series. Through practical demonstration, I'm going to show you how we do everything: how we research universes of people, how we build samples of that universe, how we read in data, spit out analysis and then read the results.  My hope is that Student Redux will take part in explaining how we read the data, and there's a big surprise coming when we discuss how to make the data products. For now, I'm going to give it to you in SPSS syntax.

I hope that you'll find this as interesting and enjoyable as I do.

DD