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...

Dragging myself uphill by my lips

The data analysis continues.

Crosstab hell. Logistic regression output all over my floor. Pink highlighted boxes of percentages and observed frequencies...

Plenty of good significance level, plenty of power in the sample populations in both data sets.

Now I have to write my interpretation of it all, draft graphs of everything and explain it all.

I wonder if I have to energy or the will to finish this...I started it. I wanted it. I drove myself until I got it. Now, I struggle to put aside a couple of hours daily to work on it.

Do I really care whether or not it gets published in a journal? The academic overachiever in me says yes. The person inside me who is weary of being a student and just wants to go back to earning a living, says meh.