{"id":1523,"date":"2007-05-21T23:25:37","date_gmt":"2007-05-21T23:25:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/duenos.net\/?p=1523"},"modified":"2007-05-21T23:25:37","modified_gmt":"2007-05-21T23:25:37","slug":"real-research-silly-statistics-and-an-enabler","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jeffginger.com\/blog\/real-research-silly-statistics-and-an-enabler\/","title":{"rendered":"Real Research, Silly Statistics, and an Enabler"},"content":{"rendered":"

So I suppose it\u2019s a sign that I\u2019ve managed to get myself knee deep in graduate school: I\u2019m starting to do my own research.\u00a0 It\u2019s funny, despite the fact I teach a class on research methods I\u2019m quickly finding out how little I really know about real research process.\u00a0 Two methods courses and a statistics class notwithstanding none of my experience has been literal real world graduate caliber research.\u00a0 I learn so much by application \u2013 I wish I could see how professors do their own research.\u00a0 So as it stands I\u2019m doing a lot of mimicking what books tell me and what I can discern are proper methods.\u00a0 In less classier words, fake it until you [hope to] make it.\u00a0 Thank God I found some help in an unexpected place: Survey Methods instructor Jane Burris.
\nI\u2019ve begun to gather my own data for the Facebook project<\/a>, with a formal DMI<\/a> 1100 student random sampling and IRB<\/a>\u2019s blessing and all that jazz, and like any good researcher I of course find a couple hundred million questions I want to ask after<\/em> my survey is released into the wild.\u00a0 I made an ultimate newbie mistake too \u2013 turns out the ambiguous category on the form builder labeled \u201cnumber of responses allowed\u201d doesn\u2019t pertain to individual respondents but how many people can respond to your survey period.\u00a0 Cleared that one up this past week, I\u2019m praying it doesn\u2019t mar my response rate too badly.\u00a0 The UIUC form builder is insufficient to perform real survey functions \u2013 it doesn\u2019t support skip logic, use of visual aids, or partial response records.\u00a0 In order to perform research at UIUC we have to use it, though.\u00a0 The 20$ subscription to Survey Monkey<\/a> for my convenience sample my senior year was leagues better, you\u2019d think the university could afford something superior.\u00a0 I know, I know, it\u2019s probably like one LAS social science IT guy who gets tasked with that and 1800 other things.\u00a0 So make it an assignment in a CS class, problem solved.
\nHere\u2019s the interesting part to me, though.\u00a0 I wouldn\u2019t have been able to do any of this research if I didn\u2019t happen to take a flexible methods course this semester with an amazingly helpful instructor: Jane Burris.\u00a0 Not only is Jane not officially in sociology, but she doesn\u2019t have any formal professorship standing \u2013 and she\u2019s the best methods instructor I\u2019ve had to date.\u00a0 Why?\u00a0 She guides the advanced students through whatever research they wish to do.\u00a0 No contrived artificial projects on far away unrelated countries or pretend ethnographies on environments we all know too well \u2013 I was told to design my own survey, collect my own data, and work to analyze it for an eventual publication!\u00a0 No other class in Sociology (that I know of) offers that kind of opportunity.\u00a0 Thanks to Jane I\u2019ve been able to not only start the Facebook Project<\/a>, but start it with a little confidence about my methods.
\nThere are drawbacks though.\u00a0 I never really learned statistics. I mean sure, I can tell you about how to use and interpret a few statistical significance tests or even a little bit about linear or logarithmic regression.\u00a0 But I have absolutely no idea how to employ which statistical tests to my own data.\u00a0 In class we were taught the mechanics of a test, how to interpret the results \u2013 but not how and when to use it<\/strong>!\u00a0 I\u2019ve picked up some basics from the crosstabs and Pearon\u2019s Chi-square material I teach in 380, but I want to know when I should isolate specific variables to determine a causal factor.\u00a0 If I\u2019m studying social capital and have all of these substantively defined concepts and conceptualized variables to represent this, how then do I take a statistics test and say something about them?\u00a0 I\u2019m not just talking oh look the median number of friends on Facebook \u2013 I\u2019m talking about controlling for race and year in school to identify if gender alone significantly impacts the ways Facebook is used as a supplement to social capital!\u00a0 We\u2019re talking many variables that all intersect that I don\u2019t know how to relate to one another with statistics in meaningful ways<\/strong>.\u00a0 So enough complaining, I just wanted to give examples.\u00a0 I\u2019m hoping I can find a class or an individual who can tell me that Cronbach\u2019s alpha would best illustrate the connections between my matrix of Facebook usage variables to say, perceptions on digital privacy.\u00a0 So that is, designing a plan of analysis for my data<\/strong>.\u00a0 I can coax a computer into doing the thuckethead statistics for me and check with a book to see what the results mean in technical terms.
\nA happy conclusion?\u00a0 Jane has offered to help me sort through my data this summer.\u00a0 I\u2019m looking forward to seeing what results!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So I suppose it\u2019s a sign that I\u2019ve managed to get myself knee deep in graduate school: I\u2019m starting to do my own research.\u00a0 It\u2019s funny, despite the fact I teach a class on research methods I\u2019m quickly finding out how little I really know about real research process.\u00a0 Two methods courses and a statistics […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[138,306,327,342],"class_list":["post-1523","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-facebook","tag-research","tag-shutup-jeff","tag-sociology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeffginger.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1523","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeffginger.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeffginger.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeffginger.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeffginger.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1523"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jeffginger.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1523\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeffginger.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1523"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeffginger.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1523"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeffginger.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1523"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}