have been spending the past three days addressing the issues which john raised during our meeting last week.
over the weekend, i toiled to come up with the chapter which simply describes the results. i'm not sure if 'toiled' is the most appropriate word (on balance i think it is) because the results had been processed around March this year (we're just talking about the results from the pilot study) and all i had to do was to draw a few (actually, nearly a hundred) tables in Word and plonk the data generated by SPSS in. very very tedious work.
today i got john's reaction to my weekend labour, and he thinks (hardly surprisingly) that there are too many tables.
:-P
so i told him that he has to teach me how to consolidate the tables.
an appointment has been made, for later this week.
in the meantime, i have more homework. i have to add additional fields into my FileMaker database to reflect whether or not each of the pupils was successful in the orienteering task. also, i have to add fields to reflect all the discourse types.
thank God the raw discourse-type data from the pilot was tallied earlier this year too. all i have to do is to create the fields and populate them. seems to be a fairly mindless job.
all this number-crunching has been something which i have been putting off for the longest time. i remember that i was one of the few in my class who actually enjoyed the compulsory statistics courses back in England. but that was a long time ago (nearly twenty years, in fact) and i honestly cannot remember much.
on a not-unrelated note, i finally managed to suss out how to export data from FileMaker into SPSS. it turns out i have to use Excel as an intermediary. it's actually quite painless, and it's a relief to see the data from the entire study in an SPSS table, all the better to spin with.
