Stats Camp
Week one of SROP was Stats Camp; a 6 day statistics boot camp with the purpose of teaching the importance of statistics in research. All of the SROP student were split into teams of 3 and tasked with learning how to use a programming software called R to do statistical analysis of data. By the end of the week, each group needed to have completed a research paper and created a PowerPoint presentation to present on one of 5 topics. My group's topic was binge drinking.
Initially, I thought the project would be pretty easy; that we would just do a little background research on binge drinking and present about it and that the statistical analysis would be fairly easy because I had just taken a class that consisted of a decent amount of statistics as its course material. However, I was shown otherwise after finding out that each team member would have to create our own research question to test statistically. We also had to use the NHANES dataset to do an observational study of our topic in relation to an individual variable that we felt was associated with our independent variable, binge drinking.
My personal research question asked if the origin country of an individual associated with the tendency to binge drink. I hypothesized that people raised in countries with a lower legal drinking age than the United States because I remembered hearing that young people did not go crazy when consuming alcohol in other countries because they were used to it. To my surprise, there was not much research on binge drinking outside of the U.S. and I could not find any research comparing the rate of binge drinking in various countries.
 |  |
|---|---|
 |  |
 |
During the stats boot camp, I was there were a few things that bothered me. Studying pre-obtained data from someone else that did not intend to study your research topic did not sit well with me. The binge drink definition and the variables that we chose to study were not always accurately defined in the NHANES data set for our purposes. However, this made me realize that, like in life, you may not always have sufficient resources to take your research the way you envision it. You just have to do your best and be sure to report your short comings and limitations.
Over all, I learned a little bit more about statistics and got reinforcement on my prior knowledge from my statistics based class. I also learned a fair amount of interesting things about binge drinking, even though I started off not very interested in the subject. My group's paper and PowerPoint are attached.