East Carolina University
Department of Psychology

Wuensch's Statistics Lessons Used Outside of East Carolina University

   Apparently my stats lessons are used by quite a variety of persons around the world.  Every now and then I get an email from an appreciative reader of my pages, and more often I receive queries and requests for help.  Regretfully I cannot reply to all of the requests for help, but I do my best to reply to many of them.  Of course, I am most likely to reply when the query includes something that peaks my interest.  Sometimes these email exchanges lead to long-distance friendships.  For example, an agronomist in Uzbekistan asked for some advice about analyzing data from one of his research projects.  In the months following my initial reply we have exchanged quite a few emails, many of them just chat about the weather, gardening, and the like.

    Every once and a while an unsolicited email makes me feel so good about the effort I have put into my web pages that I copy it here so that I can refer back to it when I am feeling down in the dumps and need an ego boost.  A record of hits on this page might well be good way to track my emotional swings.  :-)

Letters From One Day Our Web Server Were Down

    In March of 2006 ECU upgraded the server on which my web documents are located.  The new server software was, for a period of about one day, not delivering documents with extensions of sas, dat, data, sav, and sps.  Although our computing crew fixed the problem promptly, users of my statistical web resources were cut off for one day, and some of them wrote me asking how to restore access.  This gave me an interesting snapshot of who is using my materials.  Those I heard from that day included:

• An analyst working with the RHB Bank in Malaysia.  He had heard that I have a nice collection of SAS programs.
• A doctoral student at the Universiteit van Tilburg in the Netherlands.  He was using my lessons on logistic regression and was unable to download the data files.
• A staff psychologist at a VA Spinal Cord Injury hospital in Illinois.  He was using my lesson on the Pearson-Filon statistic and was unable to download the SAS program I wrote to conduct this and related analyses.

Letters from University Faculty

    I get a lot of emails like this one, but getting one from NYU, academic home of Jacob Cohen for many years, is special to me.

From: Jan Blustein [jb81@nyu.edu]
Sent: Saturday, September 16, 2006 7:16 PM
To: Wuensch, Karl L; Wuensch, Karl L
Subject: Fan mail, and a request

Dr. Wuensch, I just stumbled into your webpage, and found some of the lessons to be really terrific. I teach multivariate stats at the school of public policy here at New York University, and would like to use some of your material (printed, datasets) for my ?

Thanks!

Jan Blustein, M.D., Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Health Policy
Wagner Graduate School, New York University

Letters from Previous Students

    Some of my former students have been surprised to find that they cannot get away from my statistics lessons -- even when they go on to a doctoral program they find that their statistics professors refer them to my online lessons.  Others find themselves frequently referring to my online lessons while completing their doctoral programs.

From: "Emily Kuhl" <ekuhl@phhp.ufl.edu>
To: "Michael Marsiske" <mmarsisk@phhp.ufl.edu>
Date: Friday, January 14, 2005 10:17 AM

Dr. Marsiske!

That document is from my former stats professor, Karl Wuensch. I got my master's at ECU, where I took some stats classes with him. Funny! I thought it looked sort of familiar. Small world...

Emily

Emily A. Kuhl, M.A., Doctoral Candidate, Dept. of Clinical and Health Psychology
University of Florida, PO Box 100165 HSC, Gainesville, FL 32610-0165

>>> Michael Marsiske <mmarsisk@phhp.ufl.edu> 1/14/2005 9:08:38 AM >>>
Here is another GREAT regression document. It does a beautiful job, with Venn diagrams, of explicating the difference between partials and  semi-partials...and again, pretty much replicates what I said last night :  http://core.ecu.edu/psyc/wuenschk/SPSS/CorrRegr-SPSS.doc .

Michael

Michael Marsiske, Ph.D., Associate Professor Department of Clinical and Health Psychology
University of Florida, PO Box 100165, 101 S. Newell Dr., Rm 3151, Gainesville, FL 32610-0165
http://www.hp.ufl.edu/marsiskelab/  (Web site)

From: "Jennifer Wowra" <jwowra@yahoo.com>
To: "Karl L. Wuensch" <wuenschk@ECU.edu>
Date: Sunday, November 13, 2005 9:11 AM

Karl,
I am in the last year and a half or so of a PhD in Psychology Research and Evaluation at Walden University. I finished all my course work for Clinical, but realized that taking two years off of my job in pharmaceuticals for internship and practicum was not a good idea. I found myself drawn to research more and more.

Here's where it gets interesting.. In my Stats 2 class the prof directed us to your notes on logistic regression-very cool. I feel like I know a celebrity! In looking up information on stats I often pull up your website because you have the best descriptions. I think its time to write a textbook sir.

Talk to you later,
Jen

Sent: Monday, April 10, 2006 8:36 AM
To: Wuensch, Karl L
Subject: Wuensch Notes Save the Day (Again)

Hey - Studying for my comp exams in 9 days (yikes) - just wanted you to know
that the notes from your course - this time on Mulitple Regression and
Multivariate Methods - are saving my arse again. You're Great! Carrie

Industrial/Organizational Psychology Program
Department of Management
408 Stokely Management Center
Knoxville, TN 37996-0545

Letters from Doctoral Students I Have Never Met

Dear Dr. Wuensch

I am a Ph.D. student in Primatology at the Zürich University and was very glad to find your tutorial on binary logistic regression in internet. This tutorial was extremely clear and easy to follow. I could perform my analyses without any previous experience with this method and understand and interpret the results.

I would like to thank you very much for your help.

Best wishes

Annie Bissonnette, Anthropological Institute and Museum, University of Zürich, Winterthurerstrasse 190, CH-8057 Zürich, Switzerland

Dear Dr. Wuensch,

    My name is Sarah Ormseth and I am a Clinical Psychology Ph.D. student at Loma Linda University in southern California. Please let me begin by saying that your website is truly amazing and a wonderful resource for any individual with an interest in statistics. I discovered it last year when I was learning about regression in my statistics class and only regret that I had not found it sooner.

    I am writing today because my friend Narineh (also a Clinical Psychology Ph.D. student and admirer of your website) and I have been selected as the teaching assistants for the statistics class sequence for the upcoming year and would like to share some of your statistics and SPSS lessons with the students. Because these are your materials, we would like to know how you prefer others to share your lessons. Do you give permission for parts of your lessons to be distributed to students (granted all material is credited to you) or would you prefer that students simply be advised to access the lessons directly from your website?

Thank you Dr. Wuensch for your dedication to teaching statistics and willingness to share your wonderful lessons. We look forward to your response.

Sincerely,

Sarah

Dear Dr. Wuensch,

Thanks for your elegant explanatory statistical pages. As a PhD candidate, I’ve dipped into them far more often than any of my stats textbooks.

Rod Whiteley,

University of Sydney.
 

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Contact Information for the Webmaster,
Dr. Karl L. Wuensch

This page most recently revised on 12. September 2007.