Jeromy Anglim's Blog: Psychology and Statistics


Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Calculating Composite Scores of Ability and Other Tests in SPSS

Researchers in psychology often have a large number of variables. Science aims for parsimonious explanations of the world. Thus, the challenge is to develop a principled approach to dealing with the multiplicities that arise in psychological research. One common approach is to combine tests that measure similar things into composites. This post looks at how to form composites. The emphasis is on settings where you have multiple ability tests and you want to create a composite ability factor. Also, particular emphasis is given to how to do it in SPSS.

Monday, March 23, 2009

Inquisit: Simple Reaction Time, Four Choice Reaction Time, and Typing Test

In 2007 I was looking for a tool for running psychological experiments online. It was important that the online tool could record reaction time. After a little exploration I started using Inquisit.

I’ve attached a script that I wrote which provides a basic measure of simple reaction time, four-choice reaction time, and a typing test. I thought I’d make the script available for others to use and modify. The program was written for Inquisit 3.0. The Inquisit website has a pile of additional scripts. It also has a fully functional trial-version of the software.

Click on the link below to download the script. Change the file extension to ".exp" to associate with Inquisit.

Saturday, March 14, 2009

Photos from My Office - The University of Melbourne




For all its quirks, the Redmond Barry Building provides some very nice views.

User Interface for R: StatET and Eclipse

R is tremendously flexible. It’s flexible in how commands can be written, and it’s flexible in the user interface that can be used to run it. I’ve been playing around with different user interfaces on Windows for a while now.

Thursday, March 12, 2009

Saving Citation Information from Google Scholar

I have often wanted to be able to export citations from Google Scholar into Endnote. While Google Scholar makes it easy to do this for single articles, it does not at present permit you to export an entire search.
I’ve found a work around. Anne-Wil Harzing’s Publish or Perish Software (free) searches Google Scholar and allows you to export a file that contains the ciation information of the entire search. This can then be imported into Endnote. It also exports in Bibtex and CSV format. 
It’s also a great way to assess the impact and citation rates of individual scholars, journals, and particular articles.