Commentary on Sad Stats
Alan M Batterham, School of Health and Social Care, University of Teesside, Middlesbrough TS1 3BA, UK. Email. Sportscience 10, 65, 2006 (sportsci.org/2006/amb-inbrief.htm). Published Dec 19. ©2006. |
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In this brief
article Hopkins provides a valuable overview of the limitations of some of
the leading commercially available statistical software packages. The key
questions when evaluating a package are:
Does it do the analyses that you want it to do? Is it user-friendly?
And does it give the right answer? The Sad Stats article covers these bases
appropriately for the programs tested. The additional materials produced for
SPSS are particularly interesting, given that in the UK at least it seems to
be the most widely adopted platform for academic institutional licences.
However, as Hopkins argues, the spreadsheets are likely a better way forward
for nonusers of the full SAS package. One
potential problem I have encountered is the perceived air of credibility
of commercial packages in comparison to the spreadsheets. This unjustified
perception may in some instances prove a barrier to the adoption of these
tools by students conducting research dissertations or colleagues analysing
data for publication, if their supervisors or referees are uninitiated. The
writing and publishing of companion articles to such spreadsheets in
peer-reviewed print journals will help to surmount this barrier. An example
is the recent article by Batterham and Hopkins, co-published here
and in International Journal of Sports
Physiology and Performance. Batterham AM, Hopkins WG
(2006). Making meaningful inferences about magnitudes. International Journal
of Sports Physiology and Performance 1, 50-57 Back to article
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