(Isn’t that what my dissertation chair and committee are for?) by Richard Pollard, Ph.D. I’ve worked with a lot of doctoral students over the years and, until recently, I didn’t know anyone who had hired a dissertation consultant. But, in retrospect, many of the candidates who never finished their doctorates, or who took way too …
by Rick Oaks I teach a variety of research courses to my doctoral students: a qualitative course that emphasizes interviewing, a statistics course that emphasizes SPSS, and a mixed methods course that emphasizes how to complete your dissertation before you are ready to retire. For some time now I have been advising my students to …
by Rick Oaks Many doctoral students are surprised at how long it takes to write a dissertation. There is a good reason for this: most doctoral programs tell their incoming students that they can write a dissertation in a year. In my experience, this is not true. I have been working with graduate students for …
by Rebecca Andrews Research Statistician Biostatistics Consultant Let’s start by defining what moderation means in the context of a regression model (regression analysis) or structural equation modeling. You have probably already tested for moderation without knowing that you were doing something that sounds so sophisticated, because moderation is nothing more than testing for an interaction …
by Vicki Lawrence Statistics Consultant Editing-Writing.com ~ HelpWithStatistics.com When you’re lost and frustrated, statistics only make you want to run in the OPPOSITE direction! If you’re looking for the basic info to consider in your publication, here are a few starting points: Use your methods section to tell the reader what you did and why. …
By Victoria Briones, Ph.D. The first step in designing any quantitative study is to identify the independent (i.e., cause or predictor) and dependent (i.e., effect or criterion) variables. The second step is to define the variables concretely (guided by prior research). Variables can be defined using one of four measurement scales: nominal (i.e., numbers signify …
By Bryan Hamilton You may have heard about these three terms and find them confusing when approaching a dissertation or project that requires you to calculate them and interpret them into the project. What are the three term definitions from the title? Effect size (ES) is a name given to a group of statistics that …
by Gary Michaels Throughout my 25 years of professorship, I assigned, instructed, demonstrated, advised, supervised, and ultimately graded well over 5,000 project proposals created and submitted by my students. Even though I provided many examples of what an excellent project should look like, less than one percent of those submitted landed in the exceptional category. …
by Vicki Lawrence, Book Editing Associates Logistic regression models estimate the log odds of the outcome occurring vs the log odds of the outcome not occurring for a given independent variable (predictor variable). These log odds ratios are not probabilities: instead, they are functions of the probabilities (p) and should be accurately stated in the …
by Vicki Lawrence Data: Do You Need to Collect It? There is a wealth of data available, much of which has been collected through large surveys and medical studies, but has yet to be analyzed. Before deciding that you must collect your own data, consider: Is the information you want already available in other …
by Vicki Lawrence Research in the medical and public health fields is ongoing, including the study and reporting of new findings, confirmation of previously reported findings, and the development of ways to build knowledge for the field in general on specific health-related outcomes. Many people find the research process to be exciting and innovative, but who …
by Vicki Lawrence dissertationwriting.com Census data are frequently used in health research to investigate contextual correlates of health outcomes. Some of the variables available in the census include socioeconomic and demographic measures of the geographic area, including median household income, education, and racial distribution. Census data representative of multiple geographic “levels” or areas are typically …
by Rebecca Andrews, PhD StatisticsTutors.com | HelpWithStatistics.com | DissertationAdvisors.com | DissertationWriting.com One common problem researchers face when running a regression analysis is how to include categorical predictors. Unlike using continuous variables, which you can simply add with no previous manipulation, including categorical variables requires extra work when performing the analysis and interpreting the results. Let’s …
Vicki Lawrence, MS, PHD Statistics Consultant HelpWithStatistics.com | StatisticsTutors.com | Editing-Writing.com o Pearson correlation coefficients are used to determine the linear correlation between two continuous variables. The Pearson correlation coefficient can range from -1 to 1, with negative values indicative of an inverse relationship between the two variables, and positive values indicative of a …
By Victoria Briones, Ph.D. Statistics Consultant, HelpWithStatistics.com | DissertationAdvisors.com | DissertationWriting.com Novice researchers often think the terms moderator and mediator are interchangeable. But these are two different concepts that require different statistical procedures (Baron & Kenny, 1986). The best way to remember the major distinction between these two terms is that a moderator tells you …
by Vicki Lawrence Why do we need to know the data distribution to do our analyses? We need to know how the data are distributed to determine the most appropriate statistical analyses to use. When the outcome variable is continuous (interval/ratio), linear regression is a common method to use. When the outcome variable is dichotomous …