Teaching the teachers: Faculty as students on

quantitative methods courses

Jeremy Dawson The University of Sheffield 10 January 2014

About Me

• Reader in Health Management

• Statistician by background

• Have spent 15 years working in organisational psychology & OB

• Teaching mainly research methods & statistics to PG students

Overview

• Why teach the teachers?

• What’s different about this?

• A case study: Sheffield University Management School

• Lessons to be learned

Why Teach the Teachers?

• To help with supervision

• To help with their own research

What’s Different About This?

• Very varied students!

• Management School – very multidisciplinary

• Different methodological assumptions

• Differing aims and objectives

What I’ve done at SUMS

• Aim:

To enable Management School academic staff to improve their statistical knowledge, in order to:

i. enable them to supervise quantitative projects

ii. use more statistical methods in their own research

• The beginnings – Autumn 2011

Consulting Staff

• Emailed all staff in school with a brief questionnaire, asking:

‒ how interested they would be in attending workshops

‒ which topics (from a list) they would be interested in

‒ any other topics they would like to see covered

• Also checked on availability

The Workshops (2012)

• Based on most popular responses, decided upon three initial workshops:

1. Introduction to statistics (3 hours)

2. Introduction to SPSS (6 hours)

3. Regression and ANOVA (3 hours)

The Workshops (2013)

• After further consultation, decided on six workshops – some repeated, some different:

January 2013 1. Introduction to

statistics (3 hours) 2. Introduction to SPSS

(6 hours) 3. Regression and ANOVA

(6 hours)

June/July 2013 1. Questionnaire

development (6 hours) 2. Moderation and

mediation (6 hours) 3. Confirmatory factor

analysis (6 hours)

Current Structure (2014)

• After another round of consultation (all six

hour workshops):

January 2014 1. Introduction to SPSS 2. Regression and ANOVA 3. Moderation and

mediation

June/July 2014 1. Structural equation

modelling (SEM) 2. Multilevel modelling using

SPSS 3. Logistic regression &

generalised linear models

Example Content 1

• Introduction to SPSS • Entering data

• Descriptive statistics & graphs

• Simple inferential statistics: correlations & ANOVA

• Manipulating data

• Further statistics: regression, factor analysis & reliability

Example Content 2

• Moderation & mediation

• Introduction to mediation and moderation

• Testing moderation using SPSS syntax

• Interpreting moderation results

• Testing mediation using SPSS macros

What I’ve Learned From This

• Consulting about content important!

• Absences occur – minimum numbers?

• How well do people retain information?

• Support from the School very important!

Questions?