Case Study for Assignment 1
Associate Professor Jack Raven works at a University in Western Australia. He is known for his
work in capital markets research and organisational governance. He is working on a data set of
not-for-profit organisations in Australia from 1999 to 2016. The data comprises 18 calendaryears of data. In all, 1012 organisations are represented in the data and of these, 230 are
represented across all of the 18 years.
The research issue to be addressed is: Are not-for-profit nongovernment organisations which
include board members who possess professional qualifications more successful financially and
better managed than other organisations? He thinks this is an important question because he
has been involved in a number of these bodies and they all seem amateurish. He takes the entire
population of the 230 organisations described above to test his hypothesis. The data was handcollected by a research assistant funded by a research grant from the Faculty. She collected
details of the members of each board over each year. She was able to identify those with
accounting, engineering and legal qualifications in 40% of all cases. Many boards, about 50% of
the sample, had members with no qualifications at all. The remaining boards had members with
technical or religious qualifications or had members with university or college degrees in arts,
science, the social sciences or health. It was interesting that some boards had years where all
members were professionally qualified, while other organisations just had years where one
member was so qualified; normally in either law or accounting.
In all she had provided Assoc. Professor Raven with an Excel spreadsheet with 4100 data points.
There were a total of 40 instances (organisation-years) where there was no access to financial
information for the organisation. These missing data points involved some 30 organisations.
Raven decided to remove all these organisations from analysis. This left 200 organisations that
had complete data for the entire 18 years. This, he argued in the first draft of the paper he was
writing, would “add considerable validity to the study”.
As the matter is so crucial to social fabric of Western Australia he sees funding form the state
government.