Not so Joined Up Thinking

Right last December, IBM SPSS wrote to all academic sites in the UK suggesting that they were stopping issuing license codes for very old pieces of software. I was largely unconcerned about this. We were upgrading the student system in the summer and the staff were using over the summer and really sometimes moving staff onto new versions is a good idea. SPSS users tend to be research staff so they are largely staff running their own machines.

Now what I should have done is considered the small number of people who do not fall into that groups. There are some postgraduate students who use departmental machines and there are about half a dozen support staff who have managed desktop because they are supporting students in the use of SPSS. That was a mistake.

At the same time the decision is taken over the summer that the version on the old desktop would not upgrade to a newer version because of the problem of the depth of folders installed on it. This did not reach my surface consciousness, although I may have been told. It would not have been major we were planning to be on Window 7 service anyway.

At the same time I am getting a lot of staff saying SPSS is not forward compatible with datasets.  Then everyone get worried. The thing is that actually with respect to data files the compatibility is forward and backward compatible right back to 9 or beyond. What is problematic is the output files. There are several solutions to this, you could open them all and export them or you can install the Legacy Viewer which allows you to view the files. A further option if you have syntax is that you can send the syntax file and the data file to the user and they can generate the output for themselves. Hardly a big problem you'd have thought.

Now lets move forward to this years renewal. The new version of the Desktop is out and running a version we have codes for. However there are a number of machines not on the new desktop. These are running the old desktop and we cannot get codes for the version of SPSS running on that. The intention is to move them on in the next six months or so, but there is a spell between where we want to be and where we are.

Well what are the options. To release the version of SPSS that has a license code onto the desktop will mean that users loose space in their profile with all those directories. So if we do not release we have to deal with users having used SPSS finding the license code has expired. Most are postgraduate students and telling them to use one of our computer rooms if they cannot persuade their department to install SPSS specially in the departmental rooms seems a fair option but that leaves members of staff.

First response is that they should not be on the managed service. Actually once I looked into who it was, it raised other questions. The group of staff I had overlooked were staff in MASH who support students in the use of statistics and mathematics during their course. Their work is largely remedial in it is getting students up to the standard where they can complete the requirements of their course. These have managed machine not because they are using administrative software that they need the managed machine for but because if they have a managed machine they are using the same thing as students. In other words they may well need upgrading to MANW7 earlier rather than later. We should be contacting them and sorting a way forward in the next few days.

We need to think this through. We also need to think how we deal with upgrading in future because the need to upgrade SPSS will not go away. We will have to move to a newer version next summer as IBM SPSS will no longer be giving out the codes for the version on at present.

Reflections on Difficulties with providing Qualitative Software Training

This week I had one of those training sessions that was miserable experience for those being trained and also a miserable experience for me as trainer . Lets be clear I get a kick out of training when I have managed to conduct a training in such a way that people have really got something out of it. However sometimes a training just does not deliver and this one was one of them. I also read  In Praise of Evaluation in my denominations magazine this morning and what passes here is my evaluation of what went wrong.

Last Minute

Too much of the preparation was left to the day itself. That was not just the people who were sorting it out technically but also me! A course that relies on a technical fix needs to be tested for at some stage at least a couple of days before hand. This was just one such course. Lack of doing this showed in the fact the instructors PC did not have the software on and the fact I did not give out the correct names and passwords to the special accounts. 

I have a real blind spot where courses are concerned and nearly always end up doing things at the last minute. This time I had the course notes printed but I needed to print the username and passwords at the last minute. I had not given time to thinking how to do this and ended up doing it in a hurry. I therefore messed it up.

Bussed in teaching

Right there was a communication problem. I discovered a week beforehand students were being told that they were getting a work shop when in actual fact they were getting a very full training. I have taught the course six times in the last year and it takes 2.5 hours to cover what I cover! I had two hours to do that. The students were not going to get to work on their own projects in that time and they really should not have had the expectation that they could do so.

The problem with this is that the training happens in a wider context but nobody has thought really about the integration of the use of computer programs into the wider course. Rather they have employed an "expert" to give the training and that has failed to meet the requirements of the course. 

What is equally troubling is the students had expectations of me to teach them things that really are not the task of the computer software expert. I teach people how to use the software. I do not teach them how to construct their research project.

The separation of software training from research methodology

This is the real biggie. The course basically is in three separate parts and those parts do not hand together. There is a number of methodology lectures which talk around collecting and analysing specific types of qualitative data. There is the "workshop" I give on using software to support doing research. Finally there is the student project when they have to show they have engaged with doing some sort of qualitative research. None of the three hangs with any of the other.

At present the focus of the course is on the style of data collected. Now most qualitative researchers collect multiple sorts of data. So at one level it is sensible on the other hand it puts all the emphasis on the style of gathering data. The analysis is often treated as self explanatory. It isn't. 

Secondly software has developed, today it deals with working right from the recording through to writing the report. Using software is no longer just around coding. The standard line these days is that teaching software needs to be fully integrated into the course on qualitative research methods. That means you need to run sessions on organising data, transcribing interviews, coding , reviewing coding and checking through, developing theory and exploring data and finally reporting. These sessions probably work best if the first hour is spent with someone doing the theory and the second hour is spent with students actually getting a demonstration and working in detail. All these need a sound theoretical underpinning.

Conclusion

1. I need to explore ways in which I can discipline myself not to be so last minute
2. I need to be clear about what I am offering and start much earlier the talk about what they are expecting people to do
3. Really the course needs a redesign to increase emphasis on the analytic questions that a qualitative researcher is faced with so as to enable students to know what they are doing when taught to do something with the software.