Stats Skill-Building Compass - The Analysis Factor

Stat Skill-Building Compass: Find Your Starting Point

This tool is designed to help you get clarity about how to focus your efforts in improving your statistical skills. Take 15 minutes to fill out this strategy worksheet and get clarity about where you are and the direction you should head in your statistical journey.

Move ahead with purpose, precision, and confidence. Don’t get stuck in indecision or overwhelm! There are no right answers, but you’ll get better answers if you to take time to think about them.

What’s happening now

What is your current position and how does data analysis fit into it?

What is your current biggest challenge or frustration in applying statistics?

If you could magically, within one week, master one skill in statistics, what would it be?

What kind of data do you generally work with?

What is your go-to #1 statistical software? (List more than one if you are equally comfortable with them)

Which other software can and do you use? (don’t include any that you learned years ago but don’t remember)

Your Statistical Background

Do you feel adept at using this software or would you be more efficient with some more training?

What statistics courses have you taken? Include the approximate year taken.

What professional development have you done in statistics, statistical software, and data analysis?

How often have you used statistics in your work in the past 5 years?

What is the last statistical analysis you’ve done?

What statistical topics have you tried to learn but never quite understood?

What statistical topics do you feel rusty on, that you used to know but would like a refresher (if any)?

Your Goals

What career goals do you have that better statistics skills would make possible?

What statistical skills or knowledge would you like to acquire? Be expansive here, and include everything you’d like to learn in the next..

3-6 months?

1 year?

3 years?

What statistical software would you like to learn or get better at? How well do you already know it? (If there are specific skills or topics you’d like to learn within this software, list them)

Rate Your Skills

Below is a list of foundational statistical topics and data analysis skills. Please rate your current comfort with the topic on a scale from 1= none to 10=do it in my sleep.

Sampling, populations, and representativeness

Statistical inference, including hypothesis testing, p-values, and confidence intervals

Variance, covariance, standard errors

Correlation coefficients and measures of association between non-normal variables

Bivariate tests, including t-tests, chi-squares, non-parametrics, one way ANOVA

Testing assumptions and what to do if they’re not met

Sample size calculationsfor bivariate tests

Operationalizing research questions and writing hypotheses

Choosing the right model or test

Writing a statistical analysis plan

Designing survey questionnaires

Effect size statistics

Interpreting results of statistical tests

Interpreting confidence intervals

Writing up statistical results for bivariate tests

Univariate and bivariate graphing

Discovering and dealing with data issues

Options for small samples

Dealing with outliers

Missing data

Data cleaning

Formatting variables

Computing new variables from others

Merging or combining data sets

Recoding variables

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