Daily Archives: December 14, 2018

Spent two days throwing together the needed SPSS calculations for the poster, figuring out the extra items Howie recommended we come up with proved nearly impossible, spent two hours trying to figure it out as a group but ended up sending the data. I didn’t track to much after we gave up but doesn’t effect my making of my sections of the final paper so all is well I suppose.

Surprised handling the data has been mostly my department as I certainly wasn’t the best at SSP. Seems easy enough, I got Howie to approve my method (well Olivia did), which I tired to keep as common sense-y as possible, really just making the yeses and nos 1s and 0s. Converting the answers to these 1’s and 0’s was a bit mind numbing, but I kept it efficient, finished it before SRC with a little help from Olivia and Tom. Glad I finally feel like I made a large contribution, Sarita has mostly been at the forefront of this thing from my understanding as of right now.

WENT MUCH BETTER THEN I THOUGHT. What a massive relief. Even with 3 botched mass emails (Will Reeves is a saint), we got a solid turnout, 171 total responses. Glad I don’t have to go room to room Mafioso style and shake information out of people.

This has most definitely been the most stressful part of the overall project, my biggest fear is a lack of responses and how we’ll have to deal with that, we are honestly considering going room to room and wrangling 30 people per class ourselves. Awful. Lets hope for the best.

Got the IRB sheet back from Howie, good feedback, easy fixes, mostly just clarification and his inquiring as to where I was inspired by the questions I came up with. Sarita and I cleaned it up by the end of the class period and should be cleared by next time. Hoping we can stick to timetables (ie getting it approved by the end of the day) a bit better as the semester draws down.

Hoping our project is selected quickly. Putting it together seemed to easy which has me figuritvly speaking on the edge of my seat. Sarita and Olivia have done a good job, hope my questions are good enough, should be fine.

Very happy with my question creation, built up and around from a similar ideology test Ive ran into online. It seemed to get the Howie gold stamp of approval. I am worried a few questions may not connect with non-liberal arts people, but I’m confident the majority are simple enough to get a solid data sample out of whoever responds.

To start I’m happy with my group, our resident third luckily has free time enough to do a lot of heavy lifting, which is good for us firsts juggling capstone along with this. Our project is based around political ideology and commissioning status; I’m interested to see if the baseline at VMI is as far to the right as my 4 years would imply, or if there are more of us VMI liberals in hiding then I thought.

So, haven’t exactly been on top of these, as is tradition. In short, I’ve struggled with the SPSS stuff due to what seems to me like technical understanding. The book in most cases I felt didn’t really help, but I can’t remember the last math/numbers-based class I was good at so its probably just me. Quizzes have gone well enough, not really content I’m suffering from, mostly just applying the actual information on the data itself and following along in the book; it does an outstanding job of making me feel dumb.