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published_or_final_version / Statistics / Master / Master of Social Sciences

published_or_final_version / Applied Statistics / Master / Master of Social Sciences

published_or_final_version / Statistics / Master / Master of Social Sciences

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In recent years, increasing attention has been devoted to the inequalities in development of countries, especially the third world countries, in formulating national development plans. Geographers interested in the regional dimension of development, now take greater cognisance of issues related to inequalities in development. This thesis is a contribution to the growing area of regional development. It investigates the spatial dimension of development and its associated variations. Transkei has been selected for this study because of its historical past as a "child" of separate development policy of South Africa and as a third world country. The separate development policy and its dependence on its former colonial power, have contributed in evolving inequalities in the spatial pattern of development. Past development plans have failed to produce balanced development. There is, therefore, a need to evaluate the existing factors that have produced these inequalities to see if a different strategy can be adopted to correct the existing inequalities. Transkei's 28 districts were used in this study, based on 19 variables. Factor and Cluster Analyses were the analytical techniques used. The investigation's results are as follows: 1. The factors underlying the relationships between the 19 variables were found to reflect three broad factors: Agglomeration, Industrialization and Education factors, with contributions of 72.36%, 8.24% and 6.47% respectively, to the total variance. 2. These factors were observed to owe their existence to institutional and traditional factors with their particular spatial patterns. The districts associated with the agglomeration and industrialization factors were found to be relatively more developed, forming patterns similar to the letter Y. The districts associated strongly with the education factor, have little development potential and forms a continuous belt running from the north west through central to the eastern coast and a compact block to the south. 3. Five major development groups obtained from the application of cluster analysis, represent a broad framework within which the inequalities of development in Transkei could be discussed. From the findings, it has been proposed that the institutional and traditional factors would have to undergo major changes, if considerable balance in the spatial development of Transkei could be achieved. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of Natal, 1992.

In cross-cultural studies, respondents from specific cultures may have different product preferences and scale usage. Combining data from different cultures will result in departures from the basic assumptions of analysis of variance (ANOVA) and loss of power in testing capability of finding product and culture differences. However, the result of violations on power of ANOVA is unknown by sensory researchers. The objectives of this research were by simulating consumer product evaluation data, to evaluate the robustness and testing power of ANOVA under different cross-cultural situations. The study was conducted in two parts. First, an Empirical Logit simulation model was employed for generating sensory data. This model included respondent, product, consumer segment and product by segment interaction effects. Four underlying distributions: Binomial, Beta-Binomial, Hypergeometric, and Beta-Hypergeometric were used to increase or decrease the dispersion of the responses. Alternatively, instead of using these four distributions, the same applications were achieved by a binning step. The entire simulation procedure including the Empirical Logit model and the binning step was called Discrete Empirical Logit model. In the second part of the study, the Discrete Empirical Logit model was chosen to generate specified data sets under six different cross-cultural cases. After analyzing these data sets by ANOVA reduced and full models, the empirical power of ANOVA under different cases was calculated and compared. The results showed that both Beta-Hypergeometric and Discrete Empirical Logit were flexible on simulating sensory responses, but the Discrete Empirical Logit was relatively simple to use. Comparing with the ANOVA reduced model, the full model gave better information on evaluating the case that segments differ in product preferences. This suggested segmentation was very important in cross-cultural data analysis. Under the situations that sample sizes were equal and respondents performed consistently within segment (MSE ≈ 1), ANOVA was very robust to different scale usage, losing at worst 18% in power. From the scope of this study, we recommend using the ANOVA full model in the cross-cultural research. Results from different cultures could be combined when consistency within segments was high. / Graduation date: 2003

Bibliography: leaves 223-229. / xiii, 229 leaves : ill. ; 30 cm. / Title page, contents and abstract only. The complete thesis in print form is available from the University Library. / This thesis considers several aspects of multivariate analysis motivated by the South Australian prenatal Down's syndrome screen, which seeks to identify those pregnancies at high risk to Down's syndrome from several risk factors, amongst them maternal age and measurements from four analyte concentrations found in maternal blood. The primary aim is to discriminate between the unaffected and affected pregnancies in terms of these observed risk factors. Through the development of multivariate regression models it is examined how the Mahalanobis distance might be decomposed into distances that give more insight into where the discrimination is derived and how this might change with the gestational age at which the analyte concentrations are measured. A second multivariate aspect motivated by the screen surrounds the detection of directional outliers and the incorporation of knowledge of likely departures into the outlier identification technique. A method is also developed to account for misreporting in inferences of gestational age. Similarities with measurement error and misclassification models are explored. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Adelaide, Dept. of Statistics, 1998?

Thesis (MTech (Business Administration))--Cape Peninsula University of Technology, 2016. / This mixed methods study examined specific influences on low usage of analytics among level 4 managers in a selected public sector organisation, based on SAP Business Intelligence (SAP BI) log on statistics collected between July 2012 and June 2016. Analytics provides an organisation the ability to enable its management team to make decisions based on facts, rather than assumption. The aim of this interpretivist research, grounded in a subjectivist epistemological position, was to gain an in-depth understanding of the manager’s environment and how it influences the usage and adoption of analytics in strategic decision making. Human beings change all the time and the environment in which they find themselves constantly influences them. The main research question was: what specific factors inhibit managers’ use of analytics in organisations? A case study approach was deemed the most appropriate for this kind of study because specific environmental factors influence analytics usage. Themes identified as possible factors influencing different dimensions included: individual characteristics, business intelligence systems quality, organisational factors, macro-environment factors, behavioural beliefs and attitudes, effort perceptions, social influence, facilitating conditions and other. For the qualitative component, eight level 4 public sector managers within the selected organisation were interviewed in order to experience the work environment and their interactions with colleagues, while an electronic survey questionnaire yielded data from 211 level 4 managers. The rationale for selecting this category of managers was that they not only manage staff, but also control a budget, and would find it useful to utilise analytics to aid the decision making process. Qualitative and quantitative data analysis methods were used to analyse the data. Dominant themes that emerged from interviews with eight level 4 managers were: organisational factors and system quality characteristics. Daily log on statistics collected from the electronic survey questionnaire yielded quantitative results on usage of analytics within the organisation. Overall, it was found that managers’ use of analytics is low. Given the importance of analytics for informed decision-making, recommendations are made to increase usage.