The data is coming in! I love this part of the study when data sets are coming in and after they are cleaned, we can look for trends and feedback to help us address our research questions. The PNA is so big, it will take a while to digest all of the information and how we want to report on it but for now, I’m taking some of the pieces and analyzing away. In a nerdy way, I am seriously enjoying this! Yesterday I downloaded a free trial version of SPSS and I’m getting a preview of what I’ll be learning in my Research Methods class this fall. SPSS seems much more user friendly than SAS and I’ve already been able to teach myself how to run some of the descriptive statistics.
Can you tell I am enthusiastic about our data analysis? Last night, I stayed up later working analyzing some qualitative data and went to bed thinking about how we can link pieces of that data to other parts of the PNA. This morning when I was typing out notes I had an epiphany – I literally slept with my data! My MCH girls will laugh because our biostatistics professor Dustin told us from day one that biostatisticians often sleep with their data to help process it. I’m by no means anything close to a biostatistician but last night, I slept with my data (no p-values yet Dustin, sorry).
In my last post I encouraged you to read Half the Sky. Well if you don’t have time to read a book but would like to read something uplifting and “public healthish”, I encourage you to pick up a copy of this month’s Glamour (Vanessa Hudgens is on the cover) and turn to page 125. There is a great story about a female US solider that saved a 13-year old girl’s life by delivering her still born baby in very resource constrained Afghanistan. It’s gripping and a reminder that we still have a long way to go to ensuring equal and high quality maternal health care for women across the globe.
Data are plural. So "The data are coming in!". Your teacher should have taught you better.
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