Hi
I sympathise with your frustration here! You try hard to make sure you answer exactly what they ask (as you should), and then find that's not really what they were trying to ask, actually!
For "identify" you could read "establish" or "pinpoint" (none of those is exaxtly right!) The question wants you to describe how you would identify the precise model that would be appropriate for the purpose. You can only do this by actually constructing the model, using whatever data are available, and making sure it produces reasonable results.
If you were just to look at the task and say "OK we need a 2-state MArkov model" or somesuch, you wouldn't necessarily have identified the exact model. Eg, when it came to running the model, we might find that silly results are obtained for certain ages; perhaps the MArkov assumption causes too much simplification, etc - you won't really know until you have the model in front of you to test out.
And the number of marks can be a help - it would be hard to find 6 marks without actually describing the whole process.
Basically these questions are usually asking for the same thing one way or another, which is to describe all the steps in the modelling process, as covered in the Core Reading in Chapter 1.
Hope this helps a bit.
Robert
