Interview With a Statistician

Essay by salman1981 May 2009

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I work in an organization which does marketing research; there I got a chance to interview a statistician. His name was Peter McKay. He had completed his masters in stats from university of HarvardGiven below is the interview I took:Question: what is your job description?Peter McKay: I help the quantitative research team to design survey forms. I interpret and calculate the numerical data. I do this by applying statistical formulas.

Question: do help design the entire marketing research or just the survey forms?Peter McKay: I also help in selecting the kind of sample and sampling procedure to be sued in the marketing research. Sample is a small; group of people among which the survey forms will be distributed, in order to find out the view of others in that group.

Question: do you have to work over time?Peter McKay: I work regular hours, 9 to 5, however if I have lots of work to do which I usually do then I have to stay back late.

Question: step by step what do you first do when you are assigned a project?Peter McKay: When I am assigned a project, I first plan how to collect the data. I use all my knowledge of probability and sampling. Then I carefully design questionnaires which do not have two barrel questions. I then tabulate the data. When all the data is collected, I study it and then give a written interruption of the calculated data.

Question: you seem to be the most important part of the project.

Peter MacKay: yes. Like all statisticians I too am an essential part of each quantitative project. Because without statisticians the marketing data cannot be analyzed, and without a numerical analysis the company will never know if their product will be successful in the market or...