Excel-ling at Research: How Google Sheets Became My New Best Friend
Nidhi a -
I’m pushing forward! With Arizona’s data collection/analysis basically wrapped up, I officially moved into TEXAS. I refined my process along the way, actually USING Google Sheets to its fullest capacity and taking much of the math out of my hands. My color-coded spreadsheet helped me run some of my statistical tests for Arizona that confirmed some of the patterns I initially spotted — whether it’s significant or not, it still to be determined. Before moving on though, I settled one of my biggest uncertainties — what actually was a large contribution? After discussing with my partner, we settled on something appropriate. I quickly reran my test (very simple now thanks to my spreadsheet) and re-confirmed my results. With that finalized, I felt much more confident moving into Texas.
In collecting and analyzing my Texas data, while there was a lot more of it, I felt a lot more confident as this was my second time around. I felt more efficient in filtering our unnecessary data points, and my coding framework from Arizona moved over flawlessly. I did have to split up this data entry more than I thought I’d have to as the numerical data from Texas was simply overwhelming me, but, by the end of the week, I had my dataset finalized and I’m ready to do their analysis. I was also able to gather a majority of my California data!
Next week, I plan on finishing analyzing my Texas and California data while also completing those sections of my paper. Hopefully by then, I can also start gathering data for Florida, so I have enough time to refine my paper and start preparing my presentation by mid-April. The deadlines are starting to creep up on me, so I just have to keep my momentum!!