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Member Training: Interpretation of Effect Size Statistics

August 30th, 2019 by

Effect size statistics are required by most journals and committees these days ⁠— for good reason. 

They communicate just how big the effects are in your statistical results ⁠— something p-values can’t do.

But they’re only useful if you can choose the most appropriate one and if you can interpret it.

This can be hard in even simple statistical tests. But once you get into  complicated models, it’s a whole new story. (more…)


Member Training: A Predictive Modeling Primer: Regression and Beyond

May 31st, 2019 by

Predicting future outcomes, the next steps in a process, or the best choice(s) from an array of possibilities are all essential needs in many fields. The predictive model is used as a decision making tool in advertising and marketing, meteorology, economics, insurance, health care, engineering, and would probably be useful in your work too! (more…)


Member Training: Non-Parametric Analyses

April 1st, 2019 by

Oops—you ran the analysis you planned to run on your data, carefully chosen to answer your research question, but your residuals aren’t normally distributed.

Maybe you’ve tried transforming the outcome variable, or playing around with the independent variables, but still no dice. That’s ok, because you can always turn to a non-parametric analysis, right?

Well, sometimes.
(more…)


Member Training: What’s the Best Statistical Package for You?

February 1st, 2019 by

Choosing statistical software is part of The Fundamentals of Statistical Skill and is necessary to learning a second software (something we recommend to anyone progressing from Stage 2 to Stage 3 and beyond).

You have many choices for software to analyze your data: R, SAS, SPSS, and Stata, among others. They are all quite good, but each has its own unique strengths and weaknesses.

(more…)


Rescaling Sets of Variables to Be on the Same Scale

December 11th, 2018 by

by Christos Giannoulis, PhD

Attributes are often measured using multiple variables with different upper and lower limits. For example, we may have five measures of political orientation, each with a different range of values.

Each variable is measured in a different way. The measures have a different number of categories and the low and high scores on each measure are different.

(more…)


Member Training: Meta-analysis

October 31st, 2018 by

Meta-analysis is the quantitative pooling of data from multiple studies. Meta-analysis done well has many strengths, including statistical power, precision in effect size estimates, and providing a summary of individual studies.

But not all meta-analyses are done well. The three threats to the validity of a meta-analytic finding are heterogeneity of study results, publication bias, and poor individual study quality.

(more…)