One of the highs of Research Support

This really should have been last weeks blog, as it happened last week but I needed to finish off the already told story so it had to wait and nothing better has happened this week. So I think I will tell an incident that is one of the highs of doing my sort of research support and keeps me passionate about it.

I have worked on and off with students from the Sheffield Kidney Institute and last week one of them I had seen before when doing his masters came with another student in her final year of doing her doctorate while he was only starting his. Anyway it was one of those cases when the data was not finalised yet. Actually that in itself is a good sign, a student who knows that they can talk with a statistician before they finish entering their data can save themselves an awful lot of time and effort later on.

Anyway it was good to a have a play, and I was able to demonstrate some of SPSS abilities including the ability to draw ROC Curves which are the ability to distinguish signal from noise correctly. This is important because the research they are doing is on finding ways to distinguish someone who is likely to deteriorate from someone who is going to maintain their current level of kidney disease. The are really dealing with people who are at various stages of the disease from various causes.

The focus of the final years student's doctorate had been to develop a new and better predictor of a test. There already exist standard tests. She only has a small part of the data in so far but I did a ROC curve for the standard test and then I went on and chose one of the other options just by random, well I think it was first in the list but apart from that there was nothing to tell it from any of the others. The curve came back and it was functioning clearly better than the standard and her face lit up.

She had spent the last three plus years developing that test, she had no idea whether it would be better/as good/worse than the current test. What that one simple graph was doing was telling her, that her hard work had paid dividends. No doubt the analysis for the thesis will be a lot more detailed and a lot more complex and a lot of hard work, but to know that in the end it worked somehow makes the statistics appear less of a chore.

Lets be clear, its her hard work that has done it, none of my bits of wizardry would be any good without it, but being able to tell people they have succeeded in what they have been working hard at is a great buzz!

Yes one of them is back already asking for further help.