about the workshop

Nottingham Trent University
Wednesday 9th April, 2008
Starting at 9.30am
PLEASE NOTE CHANGE OF VENUE: CHAUCER BUILDING CHR181LT4

The workshop is a collaborative initiative between PsyPAG and the folks at the BPS Maths, Stats, and Computing Section and is free for all postgraduates in Psychology. It aims to open your mind to statistical techniques, some of which you've heard of, and some of those you haven't, giving postgraduates new tools to play with their data (and defend their thesis with). It takes the form of four presentations and a stats clinic for delegates' specific issues with statistics. It is designed for all psychology postgraduates, whether Masters', PhD or Psychologists in training, and starts with registration at 9.30am.

The presentations begin at 10am with each session lasting one hour including time for questions.

John Reidy: Moderator effects in Multiple regression

  • John will briefly outline how ANOVA, regression, and some of our other favourite statistical techniques link together in the General Linear Model. He'll also be advising on how to choose which element for your own data, and advising against the "shovelling your data into ANOVA at all costs" strategy- giving us all the chance to make informed decisions about what best to do with our data, and why multiple regression might be an alternative to explore all the lovely variance in your dataset. John will also show how Regression can be used to examine the influence of Moderator effects in your data, and push the boundaries of what we can do with regression.
  • John is Principal Lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University, and has research interests in attention and anxiety.

Isabella McMurray and Mick Baldwin: Stats and small sample sizes.

  • Not blessed with thousands of subjects in each experimental group, don't despair! Defend the honour of your work with power analysis and effect size, fast becoming key calculations to know for research, your thesis and grant applications. The session will also cover some of the issues relating to choice of statistical test and considerations when analysing your sample.
  • Isabella is an IT Technician and Researcher at University of Bedfordshire with research interests in Child and Adolescent social development. Mick Baldwin is a Statistical Advisor/IT administrator also at the University of Bedfordshire.

Mark Shevlin: Structural Equation Modelling

  • Mark will open the door to a new way of looking at relationships in your data and testing theories whilst taking error in research into account. He will cover some of the data and theoretical considerations, how to interpret and create diagrams and what software is around, giving you the tools to test your own theories and run models.
  • Mark is a Reader at University of Ulster. His primary research interests are in the areas of trauma and psychosis.

Thom Baguley: Beyond ANOVA: from repeated measures to multilevel models

  • Thom will consider the problem of repeated measures in analysis of psychological data. Although repeated measures ANOVA is a powerful and popular technique in psychology it does not readily deal with common problems such as non-orthogonal designs, unbalanced designs or missing data. Alternatives such as repeated measures regression are often difficult to implement and may not be adequate for some common research situations. Multilevel models, although better known as methods for dealing with clustered data (e.g., children clustered in schools) offer a flexible way of extending repeated measures ANOVA models that cope more elegantly with unbalanced designs and missingness. In addition, multilevel models allow researchers to explicitly model variances and covariances rather than confining inferences merely to differences between means. Thom will also discuss the software options, including the commonly available software SPSS, but also powerful alternatives such as MLwiN (freely available to UK academic users).
  • Thom is a Reader in Experimental Psychology at Nottingham Trent University with research interests in human cognition and psychological statistics.

The 90 minute Stats Clinic

Perhaps you will have some burning issues that are relevant to your thesis that you are not quite sure how to deal with, and no book has been able to solve to your satisfaction. Save your sanity and perhaps your data by asking our panel of experts to help, by emailing a brief outline of your statistical problem (supported by data or output if relevant) to statsworkshop@gmail.com putting "stats clinic" as the subject line. We would appreciate if you could email these in advance either on or before 5pm on Monday 10th March 2008. We will then answer as many of the workshop attendees' questions that can be accommodated. Should there be time in the session and if we know the answer, we may be able to accommodate some issues after 10th March.

The Charity Signed Stats Book Raffle

This year we are holding a stats book raffle in aid of Framework, a local Nottingham Charity who assist the homeless and vulnerably housed (http://www.frameworkha.org.uk). Kind authors named below have donated a signed copy of their excellent textbooks to enable us to get some of the most popular stats books in the field for free, and also give something back to the community where we are holding our workshop. We hope that you will dig deep and support us in this venture, with the opportunity of winning one of these fabulous texts.

In Alphabetical order

David Clark-Carter - Quantitative Psychological Research: A student's handbook
Christine Dancey and John Reidy - Statistics without Maths for Psychology: Using SPSS for Windows.
Andy Field - Discovering Statistics Using SPSS
Perry Hinton, Charlotte Brownlow, Isabella McMurray and Bob Cozens- SPSS Explained
Jeremy Miles and Phillip Banyard - Understanding and Using Statistics in Psychology: A Practical Introduction
Jeremy Miles and Mark Shevlin - Applying correlation and regression
Andrew Rutherford - Introducing ANOVA and ANCOVA