Discovering Mistakes Never Felt So Good

I have a propensity to make little mistakes. In most cases, mistake-making is the bane of my existence. However, I also have a propensity to discover mistakes. So everything seems to work itself out in the end. Let me illustrate...

Over the break, I discovered that I hade made a mistake that went unnoticed for a few weeks and yielded incorrect results for my experiment. This was probably the most time-intensive attempt to fix the mistake as well.

I had accidentally administered a 5-point likert scale rather than the 4-point likert scale of the same survey. The only difference was the existence of a "neutral" option in the 5-point scale. Unknowingly, I went on to code the data as if it was a 4-point scale, which affected the total scores and the z-scores for the survey results. Then I entered these incorrect scores into the compilation of results from the rest of the experiment and analyzed the incorrect data. The results were not unusual, so I had no reason to suspect anything. However, the results were marginally significant, which was not what I was hoping to find.

As I played with the new set of survey data over the break, I finally noticed that a portion of the data had the number 5 when the numbers should only go up to 4. Then I proceeded to spend an inordinate amount of time backtracking until I had discovered where the mistake had originated, finding the raw data and redoing data coding, moving data to the correct files, and re-scoring everything. Blech!

But, now I re-analyzed the data and I have significant results! Yes! A better outcome of this mistake could not have been imagined. What a relief!