Please help!

How do health psychology graduate students compare with other online graduate students in the practice of health behavior?  You are invited to participate in an online survey that is designed to find some answers to this question.  The inclusion criteria are:  current enrollment in the Master’s or Doctoral Program at Walden University, live in the United States, understand English, are 18 years of age or older, do not live in an institution, and are able to spend approximately 20 to 30 minutes to complete an online survey.  Your interest and participation in this study is appreciated.  All information provided in the survey will be kept anonymous and will not be able to be traced back to any individual.  If you wish to participate please go to the link provided and complete the survey.  The link is https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/Healthmain

This quantitative research will examine demographics, health behaviors, self-efficacy, autonomy, relatedness and competency to determine if one is a better predictor of engaging in healthy behaviors.  

A summary of the results of this study will be posted on all websites where this invitation was posted and will be available in late 2017.

Thank you for your help!

Final Defense

You have finished your study, analyzed the data, and written the entire dissertation, now for the final defense! Your committee will be at your defense, if you attend a brick and mortar institution, others may be invited to attend, at Walden it is done in an conference call.  It is typically not a confrontational situation, but rather an opportunity for everyone to hear your study one more time and celebrate your accomplishment.

As the faculty reviewer, I will expect you to briefly review the key literature, theory, and your research questions. I will want you to go into more depth on your method, analyses, and interpretations. As for your proposal defense, I will want to see that you have a good understanding of your study and the analyses. Beware if you had a statistics consultant! Make sure you understand the rationale for using the statistics as well as how the analyses were conducted. Your committee will ask questions about your study to clarify your understanding as well, as to make sure all aspects have been considered. While there will be additional approvals yet to come, most of your hard work will now be done!

Next time, I will post an updated blog index. Do you have an issue or a question that you would like me to discuss in a future post? Would you like to be a guest writer? Send me your ideas! leann.stadtlander@waldenu.edu

Quantitative Analyses, Part II

Another aspect to consider is keeping track of all the analyses you run and what they show. There are several ways to do this. You can simply save all of your SPSS outputs in a separate file on your computer; if you do this, rename the file with what is in the analysis, e.g., "ANOVA gender & age" (otherwise you have to reopen each file to see it). Another way is to print out all of your data outputs and save them in a file or binder. My own favorite way to keep my data output is to copy it or rewrite it as I go into a Word file. The advantage of this is I am keeping everything together, which is relevant (you will generate a lot of irrelevant information as you go). Do keep in mind that SPSS tables are not in APA format, so any you want to use in your paper will need to be reformatted.

I also find it helpful to think through what I am finding with each analysis (even though this technically goes in Chapter 5, I find it helpful to think about it at the analysis stage). Let us work through an example; I find that my independent variable education level is correlated with my dependent variable, emotional intelligence (EI) total score. So my first question is which education level has a higher EI score? I could do a scatterplot or could just calculate the means for each education level (use Analyze/ Descriptive Stats/ Explore). I then find that people with a graduate degree have a higher emotional intelligence score than people with a high school diploma in the sample. Is this what previous research has found? What if this is not the relationship other researchers have reported? I need to consider why my sample may be different. I check what else is correlated with education, perhaps I find for this sample, gender is highly related to emotional intelligence. Do another scatterplot or Explore between gender and education. Whoa, all of the graduate level participants are female. Could that be the reason education and emotional intelligence score are correlated? Remember your committee can help with any issues you may find.

Next time I will discuss the final defense. Do you have an issue or a question that you would like me to discuss in a future post? Would you like to be a guest writer? Send me your ideas! leann.stadtlander@waldenu.edu

Quantitative Analyses, Part II

One issue you may need to consider is what to do with missing data, for example from people skipping questions. There are a number of ways to deal with this issue (see my previous discussion). Check with your committee to see what they prefer. They will probably ask you how many cells (individual data points) are missing, for which variables are they missing, and what is the largest number missing per individual, so be prepared for those questions.

Once missing data issues are resolved, my usual next step is to run correlations between my variables just to get a feel for what is going on. I then do scatterplots for any that show up as significant. Again, I am just trying to get a feel for the data. My old undergrad statistics professor used to say you need to “take a bath in your data.” I like that visual; you need to understand the relationships before being immersed in the formal data analysis.

You should have developed an analysis plan in your proposal, so now is the time to go to it. What happens if you just cannot figure things out? Contact your committee members and ask for help. As a committee member, I sometimes have students send me their data set and I play with it a little, then I can talk them through issues.

Sometimes students decide to hire statistical consultants. Personally, I am not a fan of this. I prefer the student figure out the statistics with the help of his or her committee. The problem with a consultant is you may not really understand what they did and why. Even if they explain it, you really may not have the level of understanding you should. It misrepresents your knowledge level. People reading your dissertation will assume you did the analyses and are capable of doing it (and perhaps teaching it!) again. If you must use a statistics consultant, my advice is to rerun all of the analyses they do, so you understand them too.

Next time we will continue our consideration of the quantitative analyses. Do you have an issue or a question that you would like me to discuss in a future post? Would you like to be a guest writer? Send me your ideas! leann.stadtlander@waldenu.edu

Quantitative Analyses, Part I

You have collected all of your quantitative data, entered it into SPSS or other statistical software (or downloaded it), and double-checked your data entry. Great… now what?? It can feel intimidating to view your first real data set and know you need to figure out what to do with it. I like to get started with an overall feel for what is going on by calculating means and frequencies. Let us take a moment and review what to use when.

If your variable is continuous, meaning there are no categories you set up previous to the study, you can calculate means and standard deviations. An example of a continuous variable would be where you asked people to enter their age today (e.g., 32, 56, etc.). Examples of categories would be gender: 1 = female, 2 = male or age: 1 = 20-30, 2 = 30-40, etc. Hopefully, these terms are sounding familiar, if not go back to your statistics book and review. A good reference for SPSS is Pallant (2013).

For categorical variables (e.g., gender, education level), you can do a frequency table and get a feel for how your data look. Make sure you do not have any data entry errors, they will show up as a weird number, e.g., you have gender coded as 1 & 2 and 21 shows up in the frequency table. Go back to the original data and double-check it. 

Next time we will further consider quantitative analyses. Do you have an issue or a question that you would like me to discuss in a future post? Would you like to be a guest writer? Send me your ideas! leann.stadtlander@waldenu.edu

Extreme Scores Effects and Causes

Extreme scores can cause serious problems for statistical analyses. They generally increase error variance and reduce the power of statistical tests by altering the skew (symmetry of the distribution) or kurtosis (the "peakedness" or flatness of a distribution) of a variable. This can be a problem with multivariate analyses. The more error variance in your analyses, the less likely you are to find a statistically significant result when you should find one (increasing the probability of a Type II error).

Extreme scores also bias estimates such as the mean and SD. Since extreme scores bias your results, you may be more likely to draw incorrect conclusions, and your results will not be replicable and generalizable.

Extreme scores can result from a number of factors. It is possible the extreme score is correct, an example is although the average American male is around 5' 10" there are males who are 7' tall and some who are 4' tall. These are legitimate scores even though they are extreme.

Another cause of an extreme score is data entry error, someone who was actually 5' 8" tall may be incorrectly entered as 8' 5". Therefore, the first step is to always double check the extreme scores were entered correctly. A third cause may be that participants purposefully report incorrect scores. It can also happen that a participant accidently reports an incorrect score. Thus, an extreme score that was entered correctly may need to be evaluated as to whether it should be removed. 

Next time we will consider quantitative analyses. Do you have an issue or a question that you would like me to discuss in a future post? Would you like to be a guest writer? Send me your ideas! leann.stadtlander@waldenu.edu

Can you help a fellow student?

How do health psychology graduate students compare with other online graduate students in the practice of health behavior?  You are invited to participate in an online survey that is designed to find some answers to this question.  The inclusion criteria are:  current enrollment in the Master’s or Doctoral Program at Walden University, live in the United States, understand English, are 18 years of age or older, do not live in an institution, and are able to spend approximately 20 to 30 minutes to complete an online survey.  Your interest and participation in this study is appreciated.  All information provided in the survey will be kept anonymous and will not be able to be traced back to any individual.  If you wish to participate please go to the link provided and complete the survey.  The link is https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/Healthmain

This quantitative research will examine demographics, health behaviors, self-efficacy, autonomy, relatedness and competency to determine if one is a better predictor of engaging in healthy behaviors.  

A summary of the results of this study will be posted on all websites where this invitation was posted and will be available in late 2017.

Thank you for your interest!