This course is designed to give VMI cadets the knowledge to be able to collect data and analyze political processes and institutions, with the help of SPSS. I learned a lot about being patient and how I need to work harder from the get go in order to succeed at these projects and homework assignments and quizzes. Overall I really did enjoy this class, even if I got a bit frustrated at times. I think that COL Sanborn did a pretty good job of teaching a subject that no one had any experience with and ended up having a lot of students to a good job with the research.

A lot of the work was that done with the SPSS book was taxing and took a lot longer than I originally assumed it would. The first two home assignments took me at least three hours each to figure out because I have never ever done anything like this with computers in my entire life. Once I got the hang of it I actually really ended up enjoying the homework and conducting data and analyzing it. Honestly, it made me proud that I could figure out how to utilize what is necessary for my capstone or my national security capstone. I really hope that I am able to use this in the future, possibly at grad school, because having the knowledge of how the world works is one thing, but actually being able to test that knowledge is a brand new world for me.

Quizzes. The quizzes in the class dropped me from an A to a C, which is really disappointing. I believe I made stupid mistakes, but I worked so hard on everything else that it seriously upsets me that I screwed up and no matter what I did I couldn’t bring my grade back up. I wish that I had figured out earlier on that the quizzes mattered so much. In the end it’s my own fault, but I think for the future that it would be beneficial to have more than three quizzes throughout the year to enable students to bring their grades up later on.

The in class time was useful, especially towards the end when my group of Jordan, Madeleine, and Joseph were slaving over our group project. When started with the literature review because that was the easier thing to focus on. Jordan and I got to teach Madeleine and Joseph how to do a literature review because we had learned before in COL Foster’s research designs class a year ago. Then after we complied everything we learned, we began to collect research. Jordan is on the RDC so he had access to all of the Rat’s record and could compile all of the number of RDC send ups each rat had had. Then myself, Madeleine, and Joseph dug into the Registrar’s office to get everyones’ company, sport, commissioning status, etc. It took a bit of time to actually get all of this research and data down into an excel sheet and code it correctly, due to a few mistakes with numbers. What’s to expect, we are all International Studies majors? Afterwards it was just a matter of analyzing the data together and then finding time outside of class to sit down and write our research paper, which proved way more difficult that any of us thought. I think that the fact that you gave us some days off or days that were dedicated to the research were incredibly helpful. The project finally coming together made this class really worth while and meaningful. I hope that in the future, after VMI, I will have the opportunity to work with SPSS again.

Looking back on all of these blogs it gives me a good understanding of how much I’ve learned from this class and how far I’ve come. I was so incredibly frustrated with the SPSS analysis before it finally clicked one day. I seriously am thankful that I got to take this class in college because it gave me a branch new appreciation for how hard scholarly research, especially quantitative research is. It has been a long semester but I am happy to say that I have learned quite a bit about research collection and  analysis.

My group finished the project tonight! It took a lot of push and shove when it came to meeting together so we could comply all of the data for our project, but I am so thankful that it is done. We are planning on showing up to class a few minutes early tomorrow to work on our poster board. All in all I really enjoyed learning SPSS and data analysis this year.

My group has finally finished collecting all of our data (Rat’s major, companies, ROTC, NCAA status, which sports, and RDC slips sent up). We have also finished coding everything into a mildly massive dataset. I am pretty excited to see how all of this turns out. It looks pretty crazy just a huge excel sheet of almost only numbers but I’m actually really proud of my group and I. Seeing as this is the first time I’ve ever done anything like this, meaning collecting and coding and transforming my own data that I’ve collected, with my team, I am pretty happy. I am really excited about finishing this project.

Let me tell you that data collection is difficult! My team has been looking for this data up and down all over post for two weeks now, and we spent this weekend trying to comply it into a format that makes sense. However, we realized tonight that the RDC send ups according to each rat did not match their names, so we have made a huge error in working together and now it will cost us each a few hours to fix it. I am pretty upset about this seeing as I had already put in about two hours of work towards just my section, which I now have to redo. This gives me a new appreciation for people who do quantitative data collection successfully because this is no easy task. Hopefully we will get this all done by tomorrow’s class.

I am very bad at taking these quizzes. I have done poorly on all three of them and I’m worried that I will not be able to get my grade in the class back up. I have a 97% on the worksheets, I really enjoy them and I believe that I am pretty good at them. However, on the quizzes I have a 61% on the quizzes so my grade in the class has plummeted to a 79%. I think I’ve just been making stupid mistakes on them and I’m concerned that I will not be able to do well in this course because of it, even though I enjoy the material.

I am having a relatively easy time with these SPSS worksheets and the class is not relatively difficult yet, but I am nervous for the end of this course. I don’t think that I will be able to conduct the online analysis or sort variables or even use SPSS without help. I doubt I’ll be able to retain the information that we have been learning, especially not without the use of the workbook. If asked to collapse an interval level variable with visual binning or analysis comparative means, I can do it with ease when I have the instructions in front of me, but without those I don’t think I will be able to. This is incredibly frustrating because I really enjoy this work (when I have help), but computers still confuse me completely and I am frustrated that I will lose the information that I have learned.

So we are finally at midterms, it’s pretty weird that my time at VMI is nearing to an end. That being said, I genuinely enjoy learning in this class. I think that the fact that I started this semester knowing nothing about computers and now I have been doing fairly well on the SPSS stuff (even if it is quite literally laid out in the workbook for me) is impressive. I like that I have been able to teach myself and there is nothing quite as rewarding as progressing through my work and being proud of how far I’ve come. That being said, I wish we talked more about our work in class and more about how to apply this to our capstones. But I am assuming that we will go over that as deadlines get a little closer. If not, I’ll come and ask about it more.

Last week we worked on Worksheet #3 in Pollock’s SPSS book. In Chapter 3 we worked on Recoding, meaning we can now create a new variable that collapses respondents into multiple categories. We did this by running Frequencies, transforming the old variables into new variables. We also learned that we can do this on multiple different kinds of variables like Categorical and Interval-level variables. However, for collapsing interval-level variables, SPSS’s more obscure Visual Binning procedure provides an attractive alternative to recoding. Chapter 3 also shows readers how to use Compute to create new variables.

This week, we worked on Chapter #4, Making Comparisons. Although the logic of comparison is always the same, the appropriate method depends on the levels of measurement of the independent and dependent variables. This chapter shows readers how to address two common hypothesis-testing situations: those in which both the independent and dependent variables are categorical and those in which the independent variable is categorical and the dependent variable is interval level. We used line charts and bar charts while finding the data which was super helpful because in enabled me to be able to understand the data a little bit easier. I felt like I had a really good grasp on this chapter overall and liked comparing variables.

HR: Pollock Chapters 3 and 4

Worksheet #2 went a lot more smoothly than Worksheet #1, mostly because I know how to work the computer now. This chapter focused on Descriptive Statistics. Descriptive statistics reveal two attributes of a variable: its typical variable (central tendency) and its spread (degree of variation). This chapter also focused a lot on the mean, median, mode, and skewness of variables. The mode is the most common value of the variable, and its used for nominal-level. The median is used for ordinal-level variables, those whose categories can be ranked, its the value of the variable that divides the cases into two equal-size groups. The mean is the sum of all values divided by the number of cases, used for interval-level variables (along with mode and median).

This past week we learned how to utilize the SPSS online tool to complete worksheets. It took me a long time to figure out how to actually work SPSS, I am not the best at computers and I have never done anything like this so sit took me a while. It also doesn’t really help me that my Macbook air seems to be struggling with the software a little bit more than a Dell. I am halfway through with worksheet number two and even though it is taking me a lot of time, I am still working on it.