Designing experiments would always be simple if we could just randomly assign subjects to different treatment conditions with no other restrictions. Unfortunately, that doesn’t always work.
For example, there are many experimental situations where the subjects aren’t independent of each other. The subjects that are related to each other are combined into clusters called “blocks.” It can happen due to practicalities of running an experiment efficiently or you can intentionally plan it as a way to reduce random variance.
In either case, this is a randomized complete block design. It’s a great design to become familiar with because it will greatly expand your ability to create and analyze experiments.
How It Works
When you have subjects that share characteristics with one another, it can sometimes be difficult to isolate those characteristics directly. This makes it hard to record them as additional variables. By identifying the subjects that are similar, you can still capture how those characteristics affect the outcome. Subjects that are similar are grouped into “blocks.”
From there, you can make treatment assignments so that you put subjects from the same block into different treatment groups.
Why different treatment groups? Suppose subjects from the same block were assigned to the same treatment group. (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…)
Every time you analyze data, you start with a research question and end with communicating an answer. But in between those start and end points are twelve other steps. I call this the Data Analysis Pathway. It’s a framework I put together years ago, inspired by a client who kept getting stuck in Weed #1. But I’ve honed it over the years of assisting thousands of researchers with their analysis.
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Data Cleaning is a critically important part of any data analysis. Without properly prepared data, the analysis will yield inaccurate results. Correcting errors later in the analysis adds to the time, effort, and cost of the project.
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It’s easy to think that if you just knew statistics better, data analysis wouldn’t be so hard.
It’s true that more statistical knowledge is always helpful. But I’ve found that statistical knowledge is only part of the story.
Another key part is developing data analysis skills. These skills apply to all analyses. It doesn’t matter which statistical method or software you’re using. So even if you never need any statistical analysis harder than a t-test, developing these skills will make your job easier.
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