I think that the way that statistics is used in Political Science is more important than how I originally thought throughout my experiences in other IS classes. For instance, when I took IS-230 during my sophomore year here at VMI I never paid much attention to the charts and the data because none of it made any sense to me. I would be able to tell certain things here and there, but I never really stopped to consider what the numbers meant to what the author was saying. This, in turn, I feel, left me open to missing a lot of data that would have been useful to my analysis of that reading. However, after taking this class I know that I have a certain level of understanding that will be useful to my future in reading political studies and papers. More relevant to my current situation is the literature review and methods critique that I have to write for this IS-301 class. The understanding that I have of the data that is commonly used in these studies will be useful by helping to understand what the authors are saying in order for me to write that literature review. Without this knowledge, I wouldn’t really be able to write anything at all (or at least not understand at all what I was talking about). I have never really been a fan of learning about these types of things from other classes like Comparative Politics or International Relations, but I feel that when it was my main goal to learn about it, it somehow became different to me. This helped me to enjoy it just a little bit more than I had in the past and would make it so that understanding these statistics was just a little bit easier. As this semester went on, learning about these concepts such as crosstabs and linear regressions got a little bit easier with every worksheet that we did. I suddenly found myself understanding more and more and eventually not even really having a problem with doing much at all. Towards the beginning of this class, I had no idea what I was doing nor did I have any experience in studying statistics, and was rather nervous to get into it seeing as SPSS looked like a much more complicated Microsoft Excel. I didn’t really know what to expect, but as I said earlier it only kept getting easier. I am glad that I’ve had this experience and that moving forward in my Political Science career I will have a deeper understanding and appreciation for the statistics that authors use.

I know that I have been slacking on the blog posts this semester, but I hope to make up for that in these last few weeks that we have before the class ends. I remember how I felt about SPSS before I had even begun to play around with it. I assumed that it would be more of a Microsoft Excel type of program that I used during my time in Math that Matters 1&2. However, I would quickly come to realize that it is so much more than that and more useful. Excel can only do so much in terms of graphs and charts and analyzing. Now I am capable of running regressions and analyzing multiple variables and understanding what they are trying to tell us. I hope to use this program more in the future with more relevant information to something at that point in time because I feel that seeing myself analyze something in real-time for something that is relevant in my professional career will feel ten thousand times better than analyzing the variables in the packs provided by SPSS.

Now that I’m halfway through this semester and I’ve had a lot of experience with SPSS I am feeling extremely more confident than I did at the beginning of the semester and I feel like I could do infinitely more. I have found it easier and easier to do the worksheets as time has gone by. Even though the worksheet this week seemed to be harder than anything we’ve done so far, I still feel rather confident in my abilities to perform through SPSS.

In my last blog post, I said that I was almost nervous to start using SPSS because it looked like a complicated version of Microsoft Excel. However, now that I’ve had SPSS explained to me a little bit and I’ve used it, even just a little bit, I am extremely more interested and less intimidated than I was before. I think that using this will make analyzing large amounts of data at once easier and less complicated than it would be on Excel. Finding data on this was rather simple using the value screen and doing the worksheet was so simple using it to its fullest degree.

SPSS looks very similar to Microsoft Excel, but I’m not sure where the similarities and differences are outside of the visual aspect of it. Honestly, I haven’t really touched Microsoft Excel since rat year in Math that Matters so I will be very interested in becoming familiar with SPSS in general. I don’t know much in terms of graphing and tables, but what I do know is that while I know the bare minimum basics of Excel, SPSS looks more like something that would be used to analyze things instead of equating them. This is why in particular I’m more interested in learning more about the analyze tab that is on the top of the screen. I feel like this will help me more in the future if SPSS is ever brought back up in my job or in any situation.

The thing that I feel the most apprehensive about in this class is the fact that I don’t really know much about analyzing and computer programs. I have always been interested in computers, but I’ve never really looked too much into them or tried to learn the techniques to work with them more in-depth. Since I got here to VMI I have seen this class on my Program Evaluation and I have always wondered what it would be like, but I’ve just been a little bit nervous about my performance with the analyzing part of it. I have had this problem in other classes and noticed it mostly in Dr. Heuer’s Comparative Politics class as well as Dr. Passmore’s American Foreign Policy class. I sometimes have a hard time looking at things from a scientific perspective and miss things that need to be looked at. I’ve needed help with that from professors in the past and I want to get out of that habit, but I fear that I might not be able to accomplish that and make a solid grade because of these difficulties bringing it down. I intend on participating to the best of my abilities in this class but I fear that I might not be as good as some of my other classmates and that will make my grade suffer in the end.