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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31959 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 5, 2022

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Are they survey and response items up anywhere for people to see still? I ask because a lot of the data in the raw data sheet seems, frankly, weird.

For example, column "O" in "Sheet1" is the question "You typically use a condom:" and the results in the column are almost all integers. It is not clear to me where these integers are coming from, or what units they are supposed to have. Are they the number of the result item the respondent selected? Ex "1" represents someone who picked the first item, whatever that frequency was? If this is the case I am not sure running a regression using these numbers as your values will yield any sensible result. Similarly several rows in this column have an identical non-integer value of "2.293838863". No idea where this value is coming from or what it means in the context of the question.

Or take column "BT" in "Sheet1", which is the question "About how many times in a year do you get tested for STIs?" I expect answers to this question to be nice integers (you can't exactly get tested a fractional number of times) but again a bunch of columns have an identical non-integer value of "6.37414966".

Perhaps relevant to the BMI/income buckets a bunch of rows in the "BU" column ("Estimated Monthly") also have identical values of "1428.597195". Aella mentions this is a computed column but I'm having trouble figuring out how. Most of the non-identical values seem like sensible number ("900", "2700", "9900") that I can see being computed from the given figures of hourly rate (column K, all multiples of 50, no repeating weirdness) and duration (column L, values from 0.5 to 8, all multiples of 0.5, no repeating weirdness). Where the heck did the repeating decimal come from?

You can see this pattern across a bunch of columns where integer values don't really make sense as a response (column N, "What services do you offer, primarily?") and there are some bizarre identically repeating values (all with substantial decimal significant digits). It's not even like it's the same rows that have weird values for every column either. There does not seem to me any relation between which columns have these rows across columns.

I'm also interested in the procedures for generating the correlations in "Sheet3". There are listed correlations for categorical variables (like the aforementioned column N) but what procedure was used to generate them? The procedure for calculating the correlation between different kinds of variables (ex, categorical vs continuous) are different. Were the results of column N treated as categorical (how do you do a categorical calculation with the weird decimal values?) or continuous?

Nice find! Feels like this should be more prominently displayed than just in a box that appears when you hover over column A1 (at least, that's the only way I see it).

Yeah, I totally missed that. I still don't get why the 1428.597195 value is in the estimated monthly column. There shouldn't be any missing data in that column, right?

Correct, assuming it's calculated the way you mention in the other comment. Row 13, for example, has all three of the columns used in the calculation populated but has the autofilled value. Rather, none of the three columns used in the calculation contain any auto-filled averages (based on a quick calculation of each columns average). Honestly, the fact that every field is a raw integer (so she didn't use Sheets built in functionality to compute these numbers) makes me wonder if there was some copy paste issue from elsewhere?

I'm inclined to try and contact her and ask her to upload the actual raw data from the google form. Calling this raw is a bit of a stretch.

I hadn't really looked at the data much, but you are absolutely right. Something is not right. I found what must be the survey responses here. I had assumed that the condom question was answered on a scale such as "never", "sometimes", "often", "always", but that appears to not be the case.

Aella mentions this is a computed column but I'm having trouble figuring out how.

As far as I can see it is computed by multiplying columns

  • "On average, how many appointments do you have a month?"

  • "In general, the most common length of time you tend to get booked for is ___ hours"

  • "Hourly (ADJ)"

This matches the values in "Estimated Monthly" that aren't "1428.597195". I have no idea how hourly rate has been adjusted, though.

First I thought the weird non-integer values were some sort of corruption, but the correlation in sheet3 for BMI and estimated monthly matches the column with the "1428.597195" values, but when I do it with the newly computed estimated monthly values I get no correlation (-0.077). Very strange.

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