The Data Is In!!

I haven't posted in a while because my nose has been to the grindstone dealing with all of my dissertation data. It has taken about 14 months to get it all, but more than 4,000 people later, I finally have all of my experimental cells filled with the minimum number of respondants I need to have enough power for my analyses.

My Excel files require quite a bit of formatting to get them to the point where I can import them into SPSS for the analyses. My data is spread out over four different Excel files in which most of the cells on the spreadsheet are empty. I have to sift through each one to find the spot where my data actually is located. This happened because I had to direct people to different questions based on their responses to previous ones. This means most people skipped over most of the questions, thus the blank cells. I need to get the actual data into the correct location on the spread sheet. If the four Excel files represent the United States, I have to get the data into WA state when it may actually be located over in Minnesota, Ohio, or even MA. The Excel file sare so large that some of my data is so far away I have to go retrieve it from France or China. As I said before, I have a lot of manual and visual scanning to do to find the data amongst the blank cells and then copy and paste it into the right spot. I have 1,000 of these left to do and get about 500 done in a day.

And - that's just the formatting for one study. At least that's the tricky one. The formatting for the other study can be done by writing some code to make Excel make the changes for me.

Formatting is totally mindless so I find myself listening to music or TV while I do it. There really is some ridiculous stuff on daytime TV. Evidently my body is acidic and I need to buy some pills to cleanse myself of all of the toxic things I ingest. What garbage!