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Re: Help with course work


From: Alan Mead
Subject: Re: Help with course work
Date: Tue, 20 Aug 2013 12:55:52 -0500
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.2.17) Gecko/20110428 Fedora/3.1.10-1.fc13 Thunderbird/3.1.10

I'm reluctant to answer your question because it sounds too much like doing your homework but I would have no qualms about answering a more specific question of the form "How do I get PSPP to do X?" where X is a specific thing, like testing whether two means are significantly different or estimating the linear relationship between two variables. Or a question like "How do I structure the data to do X?" where X is a PSPP statistical routine.

If you need help deciding what to do with the data, I think you would learn more by discussing this with your professor, TA or a classmate than having someone suggest something.  You might also find it helpful to google for similar problems and see what others have done to solve it.

And finally, I think packages like PSPP, SPSS, etc. are best when you have a specific statistic or hypothesis test that you are trying to compute.  But your problem does not fit into that mould.  You have a mass of semi-structured data that you are trying to make sense.  You might find that what you really want is a visualization and I hate to say it but R might be a better package for this purpose.

-Alan Mead

On 08/20/2013 10:24 AM, Garrett44 wrote:
Hi

I need to use PSPP to analyse some data for a report I need to write for a
course but I'm having trouble matching up what I want to do with what PSPP
is capable of doing.  I want to analyse the use of tags on a weblog over a
period of years, frequency of each tags use and some sort of representation
of the use of each tag over time.  Below is a very simple representation of
my data in PSPP.  Posts listed on the left column, then date of post and
then codings for tags (if a tag is used 1, if not used 0):

Post Names      date                   tag1     tag2      tag3
--------------------------------------------------------------
Post 1              12-AUG-2013      1          0           1
Post 2              19-JUN-2013       0          0           1
Post 3              06-MAY-2013      1          1           0

How can I show the use of the tags over time - what analysis should I be
focusing on?  Perhaps I'm structuring my data all wrong and should be
putting tags in the left column with simply a post count after date?  Like
so:

Tag Names      date                   Post Count
-------------------------------------------------
Tag1              12-AUG-2013      2
Tag2              19-JUN-2013       1
Tag3              06-MAY-2013      2

Any help much appreciated.


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