Reference no: EM132944022

Caterpillar Inc. is a garment manufacturing company with manufacturing facilities located in three South African cities - Johannesburg, Durban and Port Elizabeth. The company's chief operations officer (COO), Mr Jacob Lance, has realised that despite the recent installation of new technologically advanced equipment at the three facilities, the company has fallen behind its production deadlines, resulting in increased customer complaints.

Mr Lance suspects that the current struggles to meet the company's production deadlines may be a consequence of significant differences in employees' technical skills across the three geographic facilities. In this regard, he has proposed a study to determine the veracity of his suspicion and has sought your help with the study.

In this regard, you have decided that one hundred employees from each of the three geographic facilities will be randomly recruited to take part in the study in which the employees' baseline skills in operating the new technologically advanced equipment will be measured at an interval scale using a standardised instrument. The statistical analysis of the data will be undertaken using IBM SPSS statistics version 25.

6.1 State the aim and significance of Mr Lance's study.

6.2 Formulate the null and alternative hypotheses for Mr Lance's study.

6.3 Identify the independent variable (IV) and dependent variable (DV) implicit in Mr Lance's study.

6.4 Briefly describe the scales at which the independent and dependent variables in Mr Lance's study will be measured.

6.5 State the parametric statistical test and the equivalent non-parametric test that you would run to test the hypotheses formulated in 6.2, above.