<![CDATA[Jez : Weblog items tagged with statistics]]> http://elearningblogs.education.ed.ac.uk/oldelgg/elgg/jezbate/weblog/ <![CDATA[Grappling with stats]]> http://elearningblogs.education.ed.ac.uk/oldelgg/elgg/jezbate/weblog/1973.html http://elearningblogs.education.ed.ac.uk/oldelgg/elgg/jezbate/weblog/1973.html Wed, 11 Mar 2009 00:13:32 GMT Good to see from other blogs that I am not alone in struggling with the stats. Reassuring. I have found my reacquaintance with maths and hateful numbers quite demotivating, though, however clear the rationale for its study. As usual, there is no quiet retreat for the part-time student to get to grips with these things; work, family and temptation must be contended with by a systematic and determined effort.

I posted a comment to Christine that I think that once a definite need to use such a quantitative approach materialises in a piece of research, it will seem less abstract. The task on the course is important but (necessarily) still quite arbitrary. If, just for example, I wanted to measure the participation in various types of online course of people of the 4 different blood types (!!), then I might be able to use SPSS to describe various relationships.

One question is: what kind of merit would such a study have? There are so many variables.

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