User: | Open Learning Faculty Member:
Create a blog post discussing your table or graph. Did you have any difficulties organizing, aggregating or summarizing your data? Was the outcome as you expected? Did your data reveal anything unexpected or give you any ideas for further exploration?
Finally finished my data collection and got it all organized into an excel spreadsheet! I had to re-evaluate my target of 150 bird observations. Between working full time, balancing other commitment, and good ol’ Alberta weather systems, finding opportunities to get to my observation site within the time criteria I had pre-defined proved more challenging than anticipated! I did manage to get 90 birds though, (30 for each time of day) so I feel like I still have a good set of data to work with.
I started playing with my data this weekend, sorting it by species, gender, time of day, occurrence along my gradient (land, shallow water, deep water). I tried to emulate graphs that I saw in some of the studies I’ve been reading as part of my literature review, as well as playing with various functions available on the excel graphing software. Luckily I’m pretty comfortable working with excel, so aggregating data wasn’t much of an issue. I think my main challenge will be focusing on exactly WHAT aspect of the data I will use in my paper.
Is there such thing as too much data?
I do find myself going off on tangents…lets see what happens when I add up this data, or graph these groups together. I come from a medical background (Clinical Pharmacist) and was always taught that bad statistics can be used and abused to say whatever you want (many a large pharmaceutical company has published questionable trial results that are in their favor!) and I can see how this could occur as I think up different things to graph, and look for patterns that pop out.
My plan is still to stick to comparing my birds’ behavior patterns to that of dabbling ducks published in existing literature. So far nothing has really jumped out at me as “unexpected” but I’m still compiling my literature so we’ll see what happens!
An example of some of my graphs so far:
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