Altering my Toolbox.

This week I focused on improving my data analysis toolbox. I needed to be more descriptive and outline basically every small detail of my project. When I composed my first draft, I wasn’t exactly sure how I was going to go about collecting my data. Not only that, but I wasn’t sure how I was going to measure or analyze it. I figured out that using an arbitrary rating scale wouldn’t be appropriate because it could introduce some bias. By asking a restaurant manager to rate his/her amount of business, or anything about his business at all, they are automatically going to want to rate their business high on the scale. Knowing this, I started to think that maybe I could set qualifications to each rating, such as “1: business flow is low at this time” or “5: business flow is moderate at this time”. To eliminate the chance of this happening at all, I had to find another way to measure the amount of business the restaurants had. My next approach was to pre pick the restaurants, and the time at which I would visit, and go in and count the number of patrons as closely as possible. I decided to visit the chosen restaurants within the same time frame for three days of one week. I will go and count the number of patrons between the hours of 4 and 6 pm on most likely Monday, Wednesday, and Friday of the week of March 21. All restaurants are projected to be located in the French Quarter, making the setting both efficient for data collection and keeping some set norm to the atmosphere of the project. I’m still struggling to get everything in the toolbox that is needed. I know that it must be almost a script for how I will carry out my experiment.