An important practice is to check the validity of any data set that you analyze. One goal is to detect typos in the data, and another would be to detect faulty measurements. Recall that outliers are observations with values outside the “normal” range of values of the rest of the observations.

Specify a large population that you might want to study and describe the type numeric measurement that you will collect (examples: a count of things, the height of people, a score on a survey, the weight of something).  What would you do if you found a couple outliers in a sample of size 100? What would you do if you found two values that were twice as big as the next highest value?

You may use examples from your area of interest, such as monthly sales levels of a product, file transfer times to different computer on a network, characteristics of people (height, time to run the 100 meter dash, statistics grades, etc.), trading volume on a stock exchange, or other such things. Really choose anything you want that can be measured.

There is no requirement to use sources from the Internet, but if you use an idea or a quotation from any source, it should be cited following those APA guidelines (such as putting the author and year at the end of the sentence and then adding a reference at the end to describe the source).