When we were running the data for the project we had a hard time figuring out when we needed to run the means comparison tests, significance tests, or a chi-square test. After figuring out which test we needed to run for specific variables, it made the analysis aspect of things much easier. I found that running the data wasn’t the hard part. The hard part was analyzing everything and making sure that it made sense in the grand scheme of things. Now that we are done running the data and analyzing it, all we have left to do is finish the paper.

Going into this course I was very nervous about how the class would go because I have a hard time understanding computers and at doing analysis in general. The first few weeks of class were very overwhelming for this same reason. Something that really helped me get through this was to do the homework the night before class then taking time to review my notes and skim the chapter again right before class started. It allowed me to already have a good understanding of the material then going into class I had my notes ready and I was able to ask questions about anything I didn’t understand. Another thing that helped me was getting to take the quizzes more than once. I liked this aspect of the class, not because it gave me an opportunity to get a better grade, but because it showed me what I got wrong and let me go through my steps again to see where I went wrong so that I didn’t make the same mistake in the future.

Doing this class as an online class was extremely difficult for me. I learn better in face to face environments so having to do everything online was stressful. Luckily, we only had one more worksheet to do when we went to online learning, so it wasn’t a major issue for me, but working on the project was a difficult task because everyone has different schedules at home and it’s hard to contact people at times. With all of that being said, I really enjoyed doing the project. I learned about making my own survey and running through an entire research project with my own data, instead of just looking up the data then writing a paper. As an international studies major, I have never had to run my own data before this class, even for my capstone, so it was really interesting to take a class where everything came together, and I had an opportunity to do my own research.

I struggled on the last four worksheets and I think it’s because they got more in-depth and combined several different concepts from other worksheets. I found that on most of the worksheets I didn’t have an issue with running the actual data on SPSS, my issue was interpreting the data and trying to figure out exactly what the question was asking for. Asking questions in class clarified a lot of my questions about the worksheets and I would have struggled more if I didn’t have the opportunity to ask those questions. This changed my outlook on my learning in the class because I knew that I would understand if I asked the right questions, but I feel like the pivot point in the class was when we switched to only working on the group project.

The group project took everything we had learned in the class and allowed us to put that to use in a real-life situation. The worksheets provided a solid base for everything that we needed to do our project on our own, but it gave us the chance to use them in different scenarios. For instance, because my group used several different variables and we had to run different tests on those data. I think that this solidified my learning from this class because it showed me how to apply all of the concepts that I learned from the eight worksheets to our own data that we understood, because we were the ones to collect it. I learned a lot more from my data than I did learning from data from a book because I knew the tests I needed to run to get the correct information to analyze it for our research. For example, I needed to run a means comparison test to compare the outcome of  the data and I knew the tests to run, but when I did it from the book I had a harder time understanding which tests to run because I honestly didn’t understand the data that I was looking at.

This class allowed me to understand the fundamentals of how to run and analyze data but the pivot point in my learning was when I had to apply it to my own research. I think that the group project is a good was to solidify everything we learned earlier in the semester and allowed us to carry the concepts into our own type of learning. It was really helpful to put the concepts into a different situation where we are forced to apply them and get our own outcomes in order to move forward in our research as a whole.

To our surprise our group got more participants than we were expecting. We only expected about 50 people to respond to our survey and right now we have about 140. Having more respondents will help us get a more accurate picture of our data. Our next step is to edit the data to go into SPSS then we will run Chi-square tests on different variables. We are going to run the tests in two different waves. The first being only VMI cadets. The second being other schools. We have discussed whether or not to run all of the schools together, to include VMI, but we aren’t sure if that is going to go along with our hypothesis. After we run our data, our final step will be to analyze it then put it into our paper.

Starting off the project was easier than I expected. Once we submitted our IRB for approval, it seemed like a weight off of our shoulders. I was happily surprised to see that we got over 20 people to take our survey in less than 15 minutes. I’m hoping, for our research’s sake, that we can get over 100 people to participate in our survey. Looking forward into the next steps we need to take, I feel like the hardest part will be making different groups per data point in SPSS. We learned throughout our worksheets how to do it which will be helpful to look back through the book and use those notes for our own data. I’m looking forward to seeing the final results of our data. The nice thing about being able to choose our own topics was that this is something that interests us and it can be useful data for future research.

Similarly to the other worksheets, I understand how to run all of the data sets but when I get to the questions I get the answers wrong. I thought that running the bivariate regressions, linear regressions, and making scatter plots was easy. I  understand how to read the data analysis and how to record the charts onto the questions, but when I was answering the questions I would get most of them wrong. Even though this was frustrating I think that worksheet 8’s concepts will be really helpful when it comes time to run the data for our group project.

I thought that worksheet 7 questions were a lot of steps to go through but overall it wasn’t too difficult to understand. With the chi-square tests, there’s a lot of information on the outcomes. It was important for me to take my time on analyzing the data and look at exactly what the question is asking. I rushed on the first few questions and had to redo them because I just filled in the blank and I didn’t look at what information the question needed. I also needed help going through the check the boxes questions because they were very wordy, but after discussing them with COL Sanborn I was able to understand it which I think will help me when I take future quizzes or on worksheet 8.

Worksheet 6 was frustrating because, similarly to others, I understood how to run the data but the way the questions were worded made it difficult to understand what information they were asking for. The only thing I had trouble understanding was when it said “Does the 95% CI contain 0”. This wasn’t really talked about in the reading except for the fact that it correlates to rejecting (or not rejecting) the null hypothesis. One thing I liked about this worksheet was that there was a lot of information to gather from the data. It was interesting to me to see the outcomes of running the different T-tests.

When I first started the chapter I was worried it was going to be like chapter 4. After reading over the chapter I got a pretty good grasp of how to run the data. This usually doesn’t happen. I’m normally very confused at the end of the reading and the questions at the end help solidify the reading. I liked how in chapter 5 the questions at the end were similar to the data in the reading. It helped me to see the correlations in the data and understand what the data meant. It helped understanding chapter 4 while I went into chapter 5 because I felt like the information about doing the graphs were similar in both chapters.

For worksheet 4, I would say so far this is the hardest. Looking back at the other worksheets its easier to understand now, but worksheet 4 is difficult for different reasons. It wasn’t hard because of the analysis but all of the steps to make the bar charts, box plots, and line charts. I also didnt have a hard time finding the data for the questions but I did have a hard time understanding what pollock was asking and how he was framing the information. After discussing it with COL Sanborn in class it made more sense but it’s discouraging to not understand what the question is asking even though I have all of the answers right in front of me.

Worksheet 3 was by far the hardest (so far) for two reasons. 1) because there were many different factions that we were using. We learned recoding, visual binning, and using compute all in one lesson. I think the hardest part was that I didn’t really understand the difference between recoding into same/different variables at first. 2) although the book is good at step by step instructions on most things, the way that the questions in the exercises are worded makes it difficult to understand what it’s asking. Most of the time I overthink the questions because I don’t know what the question is asking then I end up doing twice the work that I needed to do, which is frustrating. Overall, I thought this lesson was challenging but the one concept that I genuinely understood was visual binning. It made running frequencies easier and allowed me to understand the data better.