Amazing Week

This has been an amazing week. What a wonderful prelude to what I expect to be an overwhelmingly productive spring semester. I was fully consumed by one objective: to write two abstracts for submission to a conference. One would think that objective would be paltry, just an hour's worth of writing and away we go. But no, not so. Not so, indeed. The attempts were complicated by extreme alternations between data analysis fiascoes and brilliant discoveries.

The attempts began with the previously mentioned contradiction in results that lead to the separation of findings into two abstracts. I began by spending hours entering reaction time data and coding average reaction times for one abstract. Concurrently, I attempted to determine if I had reverse-scored the data incorrectly for the other abstract. It turns out I did (just one more example of my strange relationship with data: make mistakes, discover mistakes, and the cycle continues). But, unfortunately, the fix didn't change the outcome as I had expected. Though, it did cause me to re-analyze the dimensionality of the data and "work my magic" with the factor analysis. The resultant two-factor solution is so exciting, addressing the phenomenon on a specific and general level. I could not have planned it so perfectly beforehand.

Back to the first abstract. The results of the reaction time data were promising, but not conclusive. I needed to throw accuracy data in the mix as well. Research Assistant #2 and I spent hours working through the data: coding data into new variables, creating a new variable with four groups by combining two variables, transforming reaction time data, taking median splits, etc. We conducted a Chi Square analysis, which I have never done before. Essentially, we breathed life into the data, and brought to the light findings that finally provide both direct and indirect evidence of what I thought all along. Yesssss..........The study that originally seemed so disappointing has actually demonstrated some rather fascinating results. (Uh, huh, that's what inner contentment and satisfaction sounds like.)

I fired off the abstract to Advisor and she was completely blown away and wondered whether we figured these analyses out by ourselves or Fav Prof told us to do it. Nope, it was all us and our brilliantly statistical minds (he, he, he). She even thinks it merits publication.

And now I'm blown away. Time to make a tangible impact on the research community by publishing my research...(drumroll please...)