Wednesday, January 28, 2009

What a Difference an Age Group Makes

This is my life. This is what I'm living and breathing and eating. Yes, data output, analysis and highlighting pen fumes...not to mention a bloodstream full of caffeine and worshipping at the feet of the fickle SPSS goddess.
Last week, just before seeing my thesis supervisor to go over the latest iterations of my regressions, I discovered that I had one too many age groups in one of my data set analyses. Not a big deal, right?

Wrong. This extra age group of individuals aged 30-34 years meant my sample population was inflated by 6,777 individuals.

Ohhhh how I miss each and every one of those 6,777 people. Not only did each and every one of them add power to my correlations, but they helped with the significance of those same correlations...
What was blatently interesting 10 years ago and super cool 10 years into the present, are now...well...best summed up as "meh". Still sorta there but not as blatently super cool (as nerdy data analysis goes).

Yet, I carry on, highlighter at the ready, nerdy brain hopeful for interesting correlations to write about in the thesis...
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