November 24, 2006
For the next time I complain about SPSS
Now that I am postdoc-ing I have had to reacquaint myself with quantitative data analysis. I have had a multi-year sabbatical from the likes of F-tests and crosstabs and multiple regression because my dissertation was qualitative. But now I am quantifying again, and I gotta tell you, the reunion has been bittersweet.
I get the feeling that quantitative analysis has resented the way I so easily dispatched it--Afterall, the last it heard, I was planning a "mixed method" dissertation combining qualitative methods with quantitative follow-up. But the pilot study demonstrated that this was not feasible and so I had to switch plans. I first suspected that quantitative analysis is trying to get me back when it enlisted the aid of SPSS and some additional software I am using in my postdoc to trip me up for more than an hour to discover one variable name and a misplaced comma before I finally could produce the correct output.
An hour. (Actually more.) One variable. One comma.
But I will refrain from complaining--especially after reading this about the efforts of legendary statistician Ronald Fisher, from the book The Lady Tasting Tea: How Statistics Revolutionized Science in the Twentieth Century by David Salsburg:
["Studies in Crop Variation I"] required prodigious amounts of calculation. His only aid was a calculating machine named the Millionaire. It was a primitive, hand-cranked mechanical calculator. If one wanted to multiply, for instance, 3342 by 27, one put the platen on the units position, set in the number 3342 and cranked seven times. Then one put the platen on the tens position, set in the number 3342, and cranked two times....To get some idea of the physical effort involved, consider Table VII that appears on page 123 of "Studies in Crop Variation I." If it took about one minute to complete a single large-digit multiplicatioon, I estimate that Fisher needed about 185 hours of work to generate that table. There are fifteen tables of similar complexity and four large graphs in the article. In terms of physical labor alone, it must have taken at least eight months of 12-hour days to prepare the tables for this article....
My one hour does not look so bad in this light. (Actually, more than one hour, but yeah, still...)
Posted by perry032 at November 24, 2006 06:44 PM | TrackBack| Printer-friendly version