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SPORTSCIENCE |
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News &
Comment: In Brief |
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Alan M Batterham, School of Health and Social Care, University of Teesside, Middlesbrough TS1 3BA, UK. Email. Sportscience 10, 65, 2006 (sportsci.org/2006/amb-inbrief.htm). Published Dec 19. ©2006.
In this
brief article Hopkins provides a valuable overview of the limitations of some
of the leading commercially available statistical software packages. The key
questions when evaluating a package are:
Does it do the analyses that you want it to do? Is it user-friendly? And
does it give the right answer? The Sad Stats article covers these bases
appropriately for the programs tested. The additional materials produced for
SPSS are particularly interesting, given that in the UK at least it seems to be
the most widely adopted platform for academic institutional licences. However,
as Hopkins argues, the spreadsheets are likely a better way forward for
nonusers of the full SAS package.
One
potential problem I have encountered is the perceived air of credibility
of commercial packages in comparison to the spreadsheets. This unjustified
perception may in some instances prove a barrier to the adoption of these tools
by students conducting research dissertations or colleagues analysing data for
publication, if their supervisors or referees are uninitiated. The writing and
publishing of companion articles to such spreadsheets in peer-reviewed print
journals will help to surmount this barrier. An example is the recent article
by Batterham and Hopkins, co-published here and in International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance.
Batterham AM, Hopkins WG (2006). Making
meaningful inferences about magnitudes. International Journal of Sports
Physiology and Performance 1, 50-57