NHS8070 2020 October Unit 2 Discussion (dq1+dq2) Latest

NHS8070 Evaluation and Interpretation of Data in Health Care

Unit 2 Discussion

DQ1 SPSS Practice: Setting Up a Data Set

Context

To best prepare for the upcoming assignments, you should thoroughly familiarize yourself with the basic operations of SPSS. In addition to the unit's SPSS-based reading, media, and resources, we strongly encourage you to explore the Internet for complementary explanations. Like learning a foreign language, the trick to retaining a new concept, word, or practical skill is to see how it is used in various contexts. The same is true for the terminology you will encounter in this course. If you look beyond this course to see how others use new SPSS terms, concepts, and functions, it will help you retain the information.

Instructions

For this discussion, you will be practicing data entry. We made the task a bit easier by linking a basic data set in Resources, the Emotional Well-Being (SF-36) Study. Refer to the additional helpful links in Resources as you prepare your post, and remember to follow the guidelines in the Faculty Expectations message (FEM).

Your objective is to simply perform data import from an Excel data file to SPSS (as this is often how you will obtain data from non-researchers). First, upload the Emotional Well-Being data setlinked in Resources (note this is an Excel file, so you will need to convert it for use in SPSS). Hint: Select the appropriate scale for each variable.

Identifying data levels.Data sets may have many different levels of data. The skill you will practice is learning to quickly look through labels in a data view and know immediately what type of data level you are looking at.

Run frequencies in SPSS. Frequencies are run on all levels of variables. Running frequencies helps youto identify problems with missing or out of range values for your variables. Frequencies will provide you with tables and pie charts to help you analyze the data.

Run the Explore module.The Explore module is run on the scale (interval or ratio) level data and the ordinal level data. It presents all the information you need to make decisions about ordinal and above level data (for example, 95% CI of the mean). Because of the way Explore works, it is less helpful with nominal data.

Be sure to save a copy of this newly created SPSS data set titled Emotional_Well-Being_(your initials) to the file folder you created for your SPSS work. You willuse this data set againin later units.

Complete the following for your initial post:

What did you use for your variables (nominal, ordinal, interval, ratio)?

What were the measures of central tendency?Standard deviation?Minimum?Maximum?

Describe one or two of the challenges you found while performing these exercises and how you resolved the issues. Where appropriate, provide the address of any website that helped you.

Response Guidelines

Read and respond to the posts of your peers according to the guidelines in the FEM.

Address one or more of the following:

How do thereported challenges and resolutions of your peers compare to yours?

Do you have any suggestions that could help your peers?

Resources

Discussion Participation Scoring Guide.

Emotional Well-Being (SF-36) Study Data Set [XLSX].

DQ2 SPSS Practice: Create a Pivot Table, Bar Graph, and Histogram

Context

It is considered a best practice for researchers to spend some time, immediately after data entry, to review the data.

 

Is the data complete, or are there missing pieces that must be investigated? Are the data ranges what one might reasonably expect?

Are there extremes in reported values that suggest an unusual population or possible errors that will need to be traced back to the document of origin?

In the early stages, it is important for a researcher to get a bird’s-eye view of their data before diving into deeper, more complex analyses. Eventually the data will need to be cleaned, but for now the researcher just needs to identify some basic information.To this end, SPSS provides some nice tools—the most basic being the pivot tables and histograms—to easily summarize and visualize interval/ratio data, no matter how large or small. Categorical data can also be summarized with a pivot table, but you will need to use a bar graph instead of a histogram. Do you know the difference?

Instructions

For this practice exercise, you will need to upload the data set (Emotional Well-Being_your initials) you created.

Using this data set and the video instructions linked in Resources, create two or three pivot tables of your choice.

Create a bar graph for the variable Gender, and then a histogram for the variables Age and Baseline SF-36 Well-Being Scores.

In your post for this discussion:

Post your creations (pivot table, bar graph and histogram) in the discussion area.

Explain the difference between a bar chart or graph and a histogram.

Summarize, in your own words, the most important messages you find in each of the outputs you created.

Describe one or two of the challenges you found while performing these exercises and how you resolved the issues. Where appropriate, provide the address of any website that helped you.

Remember to refer to the guidelines in the Faculty Expectations message (FEM) as you prepare your post.

Response Guidelines

Read and respond to the posts of your peers according to the guidelines in the FEM.

Address one of more of the following in your response:

How do the challenges and resolutions of your peers compare to yours?

How did your conclusions relatedto the most important messages you found in each of the outputs you created compare to those of your peers?

Learning Components

This activity will help you achieve the following learning components:

Set up a dataset using a survey.

Create a demographic table from given data.

Interpret the information presented in a demographic table.

Write about statistical concepts clearly, accurately, and professionally.

Resources

Discussion Participation Scoring Guide.

Emotional Well-Being (SF-36) Study Data Set [XLSX].

World Health Organization Data - Using a Pivot Table to Make Sense of It [Video] | Transcript.

Finding and Using Data in Global Health [Video] | Transcript.

Pivot Tables in SPSS. [Video] | Transcript.