Speaking Notes

PADM 5502

November 19, 2009

Dr. Neubauer

WHERE WE ARE

The final exam for all students will be Thursday, December 3.

I assume we have no one planning to graduate this semester.

The final installment of the course paper is due Thursday, December 3.

If you have not already turned it in your IRB training certificate is due Thursday, Dec. 3.

http://phrp.nihtraining.com/users/login.php

Chapter 15: Communicating Findings and Completing the Project

The FINDINGS section tends to be pretty cut and dry. It is the facts as evident in your data. Take one hypothesis at a time. Report support, partial support, or no support. This is not the place for elaboration or sense aking.

The DISCUSSION is your turn on the stage. KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE. Write to and for your audience. I think personal reference is okay. This does involve SENSE MAKING. It is likely that few of your hypotheses will be supported. That is okay. What is the "take home?"

The CONCLUSION is your chance to summarize your findings and suggest possible directions for future research.

In addition to the material covered prior to the midterm, be able to do the following thing.

• Demonstrate an ability to perform all the SPSS commands taught in class and available on the speaking notes.
• Be able to look at a cross tabulation between one IV and one DV and interpret the results, in terms of the p value, the relevant column percents and cells with expected values less than 5.
• Identify full and partial support for a hypothesis.
• Identify the value of the Chi-Square and the p value.
• Identify whether or not the p value indicates a relationship of statistical significance.
• Check to see if the statistically significant relationship is in the direction anticipated by the hypothesis.
• Interpret column percents correctly.
• Know the three major LEVELS OF MEASUREMENT and what measures of CENTRAL TENDENCY and what measures of DISPERSION are appropriate to use with each of them
• Know how to convert interval-level data into ordinal-level data using SPSS.
• Know how and why to collapse a Likert question with 5 values to 3 values, using SPSS.
• Know the difference between variables and values and between variable labels and value labels.
• Know the difference between a variable name and a variable label.
• Know what it means to clean data and how to clean data.
• Know what a missing value is and how to handle missing values in SPSS.
• Know why social scientists sometimes treat ordinal data as if it was interval by using the coding numbers as if they were values.
• Know why you should create new variables in SPSS in order not the modify the values of the original variable. Know how to do this using the COMPUTE command.