Managing Analysis

Posted on by

This started with a small goal for the upcoming PhD Doctoral Seminar 2 course – learn more about research data analysis tools. This was prompted by the statistical analysis done in quantitative research and the application of tools such as SPSS statistical analysis software. This lead to some backtracking to the posts I’ve already written about data analysis software such as NVivo and Gephi. If I want to actively apply some form of data analysis during this four week course as part of my literature review process, I need to find the right tool.

I dug into NVivo first. While this software tool is available through my university, it cannot be used on personal hardware, only institutionally sanctioned machines, thus the search for costing out an individual license for this software. While the overall cost is probably worth it, for the tasks and applications for which I’ll use it, there was more to examine before making this investment into my future research.

Then I went back to the blog posts written by Michael Paskevicius to examine his data analysis work using a spreadsheet and NodeXL software. While this is another possibility, it is labour intensive and may not give me the full advantages of the NVivo product in the long run. He also mentions mind-mapping software Coggle which he uses to build research citations into categories. Thus my thoughts turned to Mindomo mind-mapping for my research, but again, its a matter of how to build the analysis to establish the frequently used codes, in order to fully examine my research collection.

A random thought came to mind to search into the dissertation work I’ve collected from others in the past years, and search for the software tools they used in conducting their research. From Jenni Hayman’s work, I learned about suggestions on coding from The Coding Manual for Qualitative Researchers by Johnny Saldaña. Jenni also mentions software she used called Dedoose which is web based, no downloading required, with a monthly user fee. Again, after watching the intro videos and searching the web resources, I stepped back to pause and think.

This led me directly to the book written by Johnny Saldaña where he mentions CAQDAS software – Computer Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis Software. Another rabbit hole to dive into, leading me to several other software options, including NVivo and Dedoose, but also MAXQDA and ti.

But these are all qualitative data analysis tools and I’m about to dig into a quantitative research course. What software tools do quantitative researchers use and how does it support the analysis of literature for my upcoming course assignment. Is a spreadsheet the best way, as described by Michael Paskevicius? Another search and yet another list of options to use, with SPSS being the primary recommendation. This led to a slide show introducing SPSS, and a series of videos that help me visualize what this software can accomplish.

  1. 01 SPSS for Beginners – How to Use SPSS Introduction: introductory statistics, “about the SPSS work space, how to navigate between Data View and Variable View, how to create variables, and how to modify properties of variables.” also a link to a Google Drive folder with files used in the videos “including the Bear Handout and StatsClass.sav.” https://drive.google.com/drive/folder…“
  2. 02 SPSS for Beginners – Frequency: how to create a variable, basic data cleaning and data exploration, frequencies command
  3. 03 SPSS for Beginners – Descriptive Statistics: three ways to approach descriptive statistics, use Descriptives command, the Frequencies command, use the Explore command.
  4. 04 SPSS for Beginners – Correlation: two scale-level variables, correlation to measure relationships, using a point biserial correlation with gender.

This is just the beginning of a full series of videos that walk you through using SPSS software – just for beginners like me. Well worth the time it has taken to search and view. Now I’m ready to make a commitment to a combined set of quantitative and qualitative research analysis tools to fully explore data for a variety of purposes. Finally, I found the information about how to install SPSS software on a Mac computer.