Making statistics accessible using
syntax or code
versus point and click with SPSS
Pathways 12, 2014
a demonstration by Kim Louw, School of
Psychology
the University of Western Australia
I am studying a PhD and Masters in
Industrial Psychology
and I'm just about to complete my PhD
and Masters this year
I lecture and tutor in statistics and
research methods. One of the big
components in a psychology degree,
which a lot of people don't realise, is
there's a lot of statistics involved.
So when you teach Research Methods
actually it's kind of a
scary and non scary code word for we're
going to teach you about statistics
This semester, this is my first
semester and I'm teaching someone
who is visually impaired.  So, I started that  at the start of this year.
It was really interesting challenge. 
When you teach statistics, or at least the
way I'm used to teaching statistics
a lot of it is about getting students to
think about it in a visual space
so,  if I'm thinking about a problem
I'll ask them to think about it in terms
of
a graph, or in terms of a  picture and I'll draw it up on the whiteboard,
but when you teaching someone who is visually impaired obviously
that doesn't work as well, it doesn't
translate as well. So you have to think about
trying to translate what you doing on
the board,
that's a visual representation,  try and
translate that into words which
was a bit of a challenge actually.
So we in this particular course use a
statistical program called SPSS.
It's basically just a really big number
cruncher that's all it's
designed to do.   There are a number of
different programs out there that a
similar things. Something like SASS
or R do very similar things but
we use SPSS in Apra in in that third year
unit to be able to do any of the at the analyses.
When we teach them how to do the statistics
we often give them, well the way I like
to teach at least
is, I'll go through an example, showing them
on the board specifically what buttons
to click and
how to get to the answer that they need.
Then they'll have another example where
they do it on their own but I prompt
them with the specific things I need to click
and
and select and then they do one on their own.
The challenge when you have a
visually impaired student
is being able to, 1 keep up with the
class,  if you imagine that I
would teach those three different
examples in three different types of 
doing things, that maybe take half an
hour. But if you're having to listen
and find each of those buttons using a
screen reader it can take
easily twice as long.
So we in order to make sure that the student can keep up with the rest of the
students
I thought after listening to the
problems that were having with
SPSS,  using this
specific method, called a point and click
method basically just using menus and
toolbars probably what you are most familiar with
with using any kind of program I
suggested
maybe we should look at it in a
different way any something called
syntax
An on-screen demonstration of SPSS
and the point n click method
Alright, say I want you to imagine for a
second
that you're not a sighted person and just
listen to the instructions that I'm
going to give
to do this analysis.   Right, first of all I
want you click
on 'Analyse'.  Then,  I want you to go down
to 'compare means' and select
'One-way ANOVA'
I then want you to put in the
depression score
into Dependent List and the
group into Factor.  Then click on Post
Hoc
and find Bonferroni and make sure that
is selected.
Once you have done that, click continue then move to
options, select Descriptive and Homogeneity of variance test 
click Continue and once you've done that
you can go ahead and click
OK.  Now, hopefully that was
a bit illustrative of how difficult that
would be,
but also just to give you an idea
that's not any faster or slower than I
would go in a general class. 
So that is quite complicated to do if
you're not sighted person.
An on-screen demonstration using SPSS
and syntax or code.
To do it using syntax, from an instructor
point of view
there's a really easy way of getting to
syntax. 
Basically you can use the exact same
point and click options that you've used
before.
So you would go to your Compare Means
One-Way ANOVA.
It's already set up here but you would
go to this select all the options
you need
and instead of clicking okay here to run
it
you would click paste.  Now this just
pastes
what you've done, what you've selected
into syntax.
It's now gone ahead and pasted that in
there.
So,  here we've got what the
analysis that we've just selected is.
To run this in a syntax way if you
were the student, you could type in
all of these different instructions into
this syntax folder and it would run it,
but from an instructor point of view you don't actually need to do any additional
things to be able to get here
just need to click paste and then you
could save this for your student.
So now to run this you would just select it 
and
click Run Selection, which is that green arrow and you can use that
with your keyboard as well and
we've now run it
and you should see that we have the same
analyses that we had
before using the point-and-click methods
Final thoughts
Using syntax
gets around some of the problems of
actually doing the analysis
but getting to the point of 
trying to understand what the numbers
are saying is just as complicated using
syntax and the point and click method
because it's very difficult to
interpret tables in particular if
you're not a sighted person.  
Tables require listening across
columns, then listening down
rows and then somehow finding the correct
number
in a sea of tables and numbers and SPSS
gives you a lot of numbers and output. 
Syntax allows you to reduce
some of them and as an instructor you
can be helpful in reducing the number
up tables and that's certainly something
I tried to keep in mind
as much as possible balancing the
import. getting the important information but
also balancing that with trying to have
the least amount of information there.
So, that's something to consider. I guess the other thing with syntax
is that it does take sometime to be able
to understand it
at a third-year undergraduate level your
instructor might be providing you with
prompts
of syntax, but as you move on
into writing syntax yourself that does take
some time to be able to understand and
to be able to write and generate your own
syntax.  But it is fairly intuitive
and it's something that you can learn
with a bit of time
in terms of setting Una up for a long-
term degree
especially going into Honours or Masters
using the syntax version actually puts
her ahead in my opinion
of other students that are using point-and-click. 
Personally it has changed quite a lot of the way I see
how we teach people at universities and
I think that it has definitely made
me,  well I'm certainly in awe of 
this particular student, Una and as
well as other visually impaired students
because
so much of the way teaching is
structured
is around pictures and looking at
visual space and just the amount of time
that it takes to be able to read
a document using a screen 
reader is phenomenal.  So, the amount of
time that that takes and dedication that takes
that personally has
has made me think about that