Specific software is a means of improving the quality of one’s statistics that are also supposed to save the investigators’ time (Wetcher-Hendricks, 2011). Using Minitab for descriptive analysis is very easy and involves copying or manually inserting the data, choosing the necessary means of analysis and clicking a couple of buttons. The result can be seen in Appendix A (fig. 1). It is apparent that Minitab provides a variety of information, including the possible reporting measures of central tendency, the indication of skewness, “tailedness” or the “degree of concentration of frequencies (observations) in a given distribution”, and other options (Sharma, 2012, p. 186). This amount of information should be sufficient for the majority of potential studies, and I can use it to analyze the data and find out its type of distribution and ways of reporting it. I can also create various graphs for it, including histograms (fig. 2, fig. 3, fig. 5) and pie charts (fig. 4) as can be seen in Appendix B.
As for more tangible targets, the study of the Cocreation of Possibilities Intervention that has been defined by Bergdahl, Benzein, Ternestedt, Elmberger, and Andershed (2013), the proposal for which I have been preparing, is expected to produce a very impressive amount of information that will be analyzed descriptively, including the demographic and study variables.
What I liked about Minitab (and what is important for this kind of software) is that it does simplify the process of analyzing and reporting the statistics. In particular, the process of creating the graphs is much easier and faster than that in Excel. At the same time, the charts are visually appealing, and the “Summary Statistics” for them can be included in the exported file. Also, the program offers to export the results of the work in PDF, which means a greater number of options.
Minitab has a number of opportunities that our lessons did not include. Some of them are concerned with the remaining ribbons and especially the data one: Minitab can organize, recode, and calculate the existing data, and it can also generate some.
Apart from that, the few options that we tried can still be investigated. There are other choices of descriptive statistics and graph-making. For example, there is an option of creating a histogram with multiple variables (can be seen in Appendix B, fig. 5). Finally, there are interface features to be discovered. For example, I used the option “Make similar” to create the second histogram (of Cringe), which I then modified. I suppose that other shortcuts can be found in the program.
To sum up, in the future investigation of Minitab, I plan to attempt to learn a greater number of its features, including statistical and program ones.
Minitab Express is one of the statistical analysis software programs that I can use in the future (Joner, 2014). The experience of using this program showed me that this kind of software does decrease the time spent on the analysis process and makes it more feasible, which means that greater amounts of data can be analyzed. Minitab proved the usefulness of such software to me.
Minitab Express appears to be a “light version” of the Minitab 17 that I also researched at the website of Minitab Inc (2016). The full version looks more complex but also promising; in particular, it has an interesting assistance feature that is performed as interactive charts. In other words, we can have a variety of tools for statistical analysis nowadays, and we are free to choose those that suit us best.
References
Bergdahl, E., Benzein, E., Ternestedt, B., Elmberger, E., & Andershed, B. (2013). Co-creating possibilities for patients in palliative care to reach vital goals: A multiple case study of home-care nursing encounters. Nursing Inquiry, 20(4), 341-351. Web.
Joner, M. (2014). Modern industrial statistics: With applications in R, MINITAB, and JMP, 2nd edition. Journal of Quality Technology, 46(4), 377-378. Web.
Minitab Inc. (2016). Minitab 17. Web.
Sharma, J. (2012). Business statistics. New Delhi: Pearson.
Wetcher-Hendricks, D. (2011). Analyzing quantitative data. New York, BY: John Wiley & Sons.
Appendix A
Descriptive Statistics with Minitab
Appendix B
Graphs in Minitab
