Beyond SPSS (revised 2/13/2105)

I'm an SPSS girl. I sit in my Psychology Department ivory tower and teach Introduction to Statistics via SPSS.

SPSS isn't the only way to do the statistics. In fact, it is/has been losing favor among "real" statisticians. I recently had a chat with a friend who has a Ph.D. in psychology and works as a statistician. She told me that statsy job postings rarely ask for SPSS skills. Instead, they are seeking people who know R and/or Python.

In order to better help our data-inclined students find work, I've gathered some information on learning R and Python. This probably isn't for every student. This probably isn't for 90% of our students. However, it may be helpful for an outstanding undergraduate or graduate student who is making noise like they want a data/research oriented career. Alternately, I think that an R class could be a really cool upper-level undergraduate elective for a select group of students.

Also, if anyone is brave enough to teach their undergraduate statistics students R, email me, I would love to pick your brain (hartnett004@gannon.edu).

Note: I have not tried out all of the resources I am listing (ain't nobody got time for that) but they ARE all interactive. Some require registration, some don't. All are free. Some are brief, some require several hours to complete

R

http://tryr.codeschool.com/

https://www.datacamp.com/

https://www.coursera.org/course/rprog

Python

http://www.codecademy.com/tracks/python

UPDATE: I received good feedback and suggestions from my blog readers (see below).

-Via Twitter, Michael Philipps suggested JASP Statistics, free data analysis software that acts a lot like SPSS.

-Via the Comment section, Juanjo Medina suggested this blog posting by Jeromy Anglim for more information on switching to R. http://jeromyanglim.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/evaluating-potential-incorporation-of-r.html#more

Another resource for to get us as well as our students up to speed on different software and statistical techniques is Coursera, home of many a free MOOC. Here is a link to statistics and data analysis classes that will be taught in English. The classes cover an array of topics, including R as well as specialization topics in statistics.

Ways to use funny meme scales in your stats classes

Have you ever heard of the theory that there are multiple people worldwide thinking about the same novel thing at the same time? It is the multiple discovery hypothesis of invention . Like, multiple great minds around the world were working on calculus at the same time. Well, I think a bunch of super-duper psychology professors were all thinking about scale memes and pedagogy at the same time. Clearly, this is just as impressive as calculus. Who were some of these great minds? 1) Dr. Molly Metz maintains a curated list of hilarious "How you doing?" scales. 2) Dr. Esther Lindenström posted about using these scales as student check-ins. 3) I was working on a blog post about using such scales to teach the basics of variables. So, I decided to create a post about three ways to use these scales in your stats classes: 1) Teaching the basics of variables. 2) Nominal vs. ordinal scales. 3) Daily check-in with your students. 1. Teach your students the basics...

Leo DiCaprio Romantic Age Gap Data: UPDATE

Does anyone else teach correlation and regression together at the end of the semester? Here is a treat for you: Updated data on Leonardo DiCaprio, his age, and his romantic partner's age when they started dating. A few years ago, there was a dust-up when a clever Redditor r/TrustLittleBrother realized that DiCaprio had never dated anyone over 25. I blogged about this when it happened. But the old data was from 2022. Inspired by this sleuthing, I created a wee data set, including up-to-date information on his current relationship with Vittoria Ceretti, so your students can suss out the patterns that exist in this data.

Tyler Vigen's Spurious Correlations

Tyler Vigen has has created a long list of easy-to-paste-into-a-powerpoint graphs that illustrate that correlation does not equal causation. For instance, while per capita consumption of cheese and number of people who die by become tangled in their bed sheets may have a strong relationship (r = 0.947091), no one is saying that cheese consumption leads to bed sheet-related death. Although, you could pose The Third Variable question to your students for some of these relationships). Property of Tyler Vigens, http://i.imgur.com/OfQYQW8.png Vigen has also provided a menu of frequently used variables (deaths by tripping, sunlight by state) to help you look for specific examples. This portion is interactive, as you and your students can generate your own graphs. Below, I generated a graph of marriage rates in Pennsylvania and consumption of high fructose corn syrup. Generated at http://www.tylervigen.com/

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