East Carolina University
Department of Psychology
My Stats Web Pages Are My Life's Work
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. :-)
Request for Help
My stats web pages are a big part of my life's work. They are hosted by East Carolina University, my employer. At ECU, when a faculty member retires, his or her web pages are dumped, and the retired faculty member no longer is provided with any web presence. My retired friends at other universities are able to continue their scholarly lives on university-hosted web pages, but that is not the case at ECU. I have brought this concern to the attention of those in charge of web resources at ECU, and have hoped they would provide a way for retired faculty to retain a web-presence, but my communications seem to have fallen on deaf ears. Accordingly, I am now motivated to export all of my stats web pages to a server unaffiliated with the university. I have no experience in doing this, and would appreciate some pointers on how to get started on doing this.
A Posting from Edstat-L
From: Teaching and Learning Statistics <EDSTAT-L@LISTS.PSU.EDU> on behalf of
Dale Berger <dale.berger@CGU.EDU>
Sent: Sunday, December 23, 2012 2:58 PM
To: EDSTAT-L@LISTS.PSU.EDU
Subject: Re: More questions about Example Articles
Hi Michelle et al.,
Karl Wuensch has a good set of short papers focused on specific statistical
issues:
http://core.ecu.edu/psyc/wuenschk/StatsLessons.htm and more general
resources at
http://core.ecu.edu/psyc/wuenschk/Statistics.htm .
This resource and others are linked from our WISE site:
http://wise.cgu.edu under the Links tab and
then Teaching Resources and Student Resources.
Happy Holidays to you, Dale
Dale E. Berger, Ph.D.
Professor of Psychology
Claremont Graduate University
Claremont, CA 91711
Statistics Web Site: http://wise.cgu.edu
Letters From One Day Our Web Servers 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:
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
Dear Dr. Wuensch,
I have been teaching statistics formally, and informally, for about 10 years
now. Whenever I get ‘stuck’ on how to say something to my students, or how to
explain a concept, I usually turn to Google. More and more often over the years,
I have come across documents that you have posted for ECU. I have come to
recognize your name and your work. I just wanted to give a warm, and heartfelt –
THANK YOU! Your documents are top-notch, and have always been just what I’ve
needed. I very much appreciate your ability to explain complex statistical
concepts in language that is accessible, concise, yet thorough.
Many thanks!
Liz
www.mphi.org
Dear Prof. Wuensch:
I currently teach a course in Multivariate Data Analysis. Your chapters on using
SPSS to conduct the analysis are a god-send. I look forward to a book by you.
Regards,
Shankar
_________________________________________________
Shankar Venkatagiri
Assistant Professor
Quantitative Methods & Information Systems
Indian Institute of Management Bangalore
Bannerghatta Road
Bangalore 560076
Letters from Former 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: Hotaka Maeda <hmaeda@uwm.edu>
Sent: Sunday, September 22, 2013 12:28 PM
To: Wuensch, Karl L
I am doing great. I am taking a statistics course by Dr. Brondino who recognized you when I told him that I took your course. Your website is on his syllabus! He was saying something about you two were working on one paper and kept disagreeing with each other. He regarded you very highly. I think he is very good too.
Hotaka Maeda
PhD Student
Physical Activity & Health Research Laboratory Department of
Kinesiology University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
From: Kelly Trindel <trindelk@queens.edu>
Sent: Friday, February 24, 2012 10:05 AM
To: Wuensch, Karl L
Subject: RE: http://core.ecu.edu/psyc/wuenschk/Research/Res-grads.htm
I have to tell you that your name came up recently! I was speaking to a
colleague of mine at EEOC about where to find the best SAS programming and
analytic resources on the web and she said: "There's this guy called Karl
Wuensch who has a lot of stuff out there, it's very informative and easy to
understand, also very funny..." I felt like I knew some one famous. :-)
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.docx .
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 Multiple 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,
Maybe it is just the season, or perhaps it is the fact that I have just South of
100 days before I defend my thesis, but in either case I feel the need to reach
out to those who have assisted me in pursuit of my late career PhD.
I found your SPSS website and tutorial documents over 3 years ago as I waded
back into statistics after a 25 year career in industry. I found those documents
clear, concise and extremely user focused. I am here to report that I am still
using them today (literally… today) as I review and assess the initial findings
of my first pass analysis of thesis data.
Thank you for selflessly sharing your experience and expertise. I am finding
this a rare quality among some academics.
I am hoping this email won’t be lost in your end of the semester rush, and you
will take a moment to ponder your positive impact on budding scholars and
non-traditional students near and far.
Best to you sir,
Mary Pilotte
Faculty Fellow 1st year Engineering Program
Doctoral Candidate School of Engineering Education
Purdue University
Dear Dr. Wuensch,
I am a Phd student from University of Tehran. I just want to say thank you for
the comprehensive lesson on Factor Analysis you put on the site. You saved my
data. I didn't know how to interprete the output and I learned a lot.
regards,
Afsaneh Dehand
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.
My name is Tiffany and I live in Bellingham, Wa and go to Western Washington University. This weekend I was frantically trying to find out how to do 2-way within subjects ANOVAs for a big research paper I've been behind on (and only found out recently the stats I need to run are the only stats that won't be covered in lecture...) and came across your incredibly useful website. I've attempted finding better sources but yours has been the most extensive and helpful so far. I want to move to your college and attend your lectures! Thank you so much for having your website!
Feb., 2012
Contact Information for the Webmaster,
Dr. Karl L. Wuensch
This page most recently revised on the 22nd of September, 2013.