If you analyze non-experimental data, is it helpful to understand experimental design principles?
Yes, absolutely! Understanding experimental design can help you recognize the questions you can and can’t answer with the data. It will also help you identify possible sources of bias that can lead to undesirable results. Finally, it will help you provide recommendations to make future studies more efficient. (more…)
There is a lot of skill needed to perform good data analyses. It is not just about statistical knowledge (though more statistical knowledge is always helpful). Organizing your data analysis, and knowing how to do that, is a key skill. 
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It’s easy to develop bad habits in data analysis. When you’re new to it, you just don’t have enough experience to realize that what feels like efficiency will actually come back to make things take longer, introduce problems, and lead to more frustration. (more…)
classes, and colleagues and journal reviews question your results because of it. But there are really only a few causes of multicollinearity. Let’s explore them.Multicollinearity is simply redundancy in the information contained in predictor variables. If the redundancy is moderate, (more…)One of the difficult decisions in mixed modeling is deciding which factors are fixed and which are random. And as difficult as it is, it’s also very important. Correctly specifying the fixed and random factors of the model is vital to obtain accurate analyses.
Now, you may be thinking of the fixed and random effects in the model, rather than the factors themselves, as fixed or random. If so, remember that each term in the model (factor, covariate, interaction or other multiplicative term) has an effect. We’ll come back to how the model measures the effects for fixed and random factors.
Sadly, the definitions in many texts don’t help much with decisions to specify factors as fixed or random. Textbook examples are often artificial and hard to apply to the real, messy data you’re working with.
Here’s the real kicker. The same factor can often be fixed or random, depending on the researcher’s objective. (more…)
In this nearly 6-hour tutorial you will learn menu-based R libraries so you can use R without having to fuss with R code. These libraries don’t cover everything R can do, but they do quite a bit and can set you up to make running R much easier.