Audra Diers-Lawson

I’ve been teaching research methods and supervising bachelor’s and master’s students in communication on their projects for a while now and know how intimidating it is to think of running and interpreting statistics for the first time. As a confession, I’m not a math person and during my Master’s program I put off my statistics class for about as long as I possibly could saying, ‘I’m a qualitative researcher….’ when the truth was that I was intimidated by it. Fortunately, I had a great professor who really taught me that statistics for most social scientists is an exercise in logic and reasoning from numbers and not mathematics.

If it’s been a while since you had to get started on a data analysis project and you need a refresher or if it’s your first project, I’ve put together a podcast series for getting going. All you need is some data, SPSS, and some time to go step-by-step through the process. I’ve designed the podcasts so that you can watch, pause, and try what I’ve just done. The first three podcasts are all about getting your data file set up and ready to analyze, so dip into and out of them as needed, but if it’s your first time doing an analysis on your own, I do recommend that you watch all three of them in order. The last three podcasts are specific to ANOVA, correlations, and regressions — so use them as you need.

If you would like to follow the channel more directly — feel free to take a look at the Podcast series on my YouTube channel directly or click on the videos in this post.