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9.7: Fireside chat

  • Page ID
    16821
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    Sometimes it’s good to get together around a fire and have a chat. Let’s pretend we’re sitting around a fire.

    It’s been a long day. A long couple of weeks and months since we started this course on statistics. We just went through the most complicated things we have done so far. This is a long chapter. What should we do next?

    Here’s a couple of options. We could work through, by hand, more and more ANOVAs. Do you want to do that? I don’t, making these tables isn’t too bad, but it takes a lot of time. It’s really good to see everything that we do laid bare in the table form a few times. We’ve done that already. It’s really good for you to attempt to calculate an ANOVA by hand at least once in your life. It builds character. It helps you know that you know what you are doing, and what the ANOVA is doing. We can’t make you do this, we can only make the suggestion. If we keep doing these by hand, it is not good for us, and it is not you doing them by hand. So, what are the other options.

    The other options are to work at a slightly higher level. We will discuss some research designs, and the ANOVAs that are appropriate for their analysis. We will conduct the ANOVAs using R, and print out the ANOVA tables. This is what you do in the lab, and what most researchers do. They use software most of the time to make the computer do the work. Because of this, it is most important that you know what the software is doing. You can make mistakes when telling software what to do, so you need to be able to check the software’s work so you know when the software is giving you wrong answers. All of these skills are built up over time through the process of analyzing different data sets. So, for the remainder of our discussion on ANOVAs we stick to that higher level. No more monster tables of SSes. You are welcome.


    This page titled 9.7: Fireside chat is shared under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Matthew J. C. Crump via source content that was edited to the style and standards of the LibreTexts platform; a detailed edit history is available upon request.

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