Friday, August 15, 2008

Highlights from ICPSR

Save the residuals. Some matrices look perfectly nice and well behaved, but they are KILLERS! Let the numbers work for you, and listen to the story they are telling you. Interpret results both statistically AND substantively. Have some class when you say Poisson; it's not poison. It's not where you go to school but what you do with it. Have confidence in what you do, what you know, and what you can contribute to the field.

One of the most important things that I learned this past 4 weeks is to remember that results have both statistical and substantive meaning. All too often, the p values and significance levels get emphasized so much that the real world meaning of the results simply gets lost. So, my regression professor emphasized over and over that we need to interpret out results both statistically and substantively. Numbers have real world meaning, and it's not all about the asterisks.

All right, I'm off to play now. Stay tuned for pictures!

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