Here at OPTIC Lab we try to make everything educational, engaging and fun! Our research comes hand in hand with lots of data. This means we have to put in the time and go through raw data fairly often. To make the tedious task of cleaning data bearable we have data analysis parties. Normally, these parties have balloons, treats, and music. However, given the current pandemic, we adapted to have our first ever online data analysis party. It was a huge success.

Learning about statistics in class can be hard to translate into working with real data. During the data analysis party those attending get hands on experience with data. At our most recent party we had people with a variety of experience with data, ranging from undergraduate students to Ph.D. candidates. No matter their level of prior knowledge, we tried to make the party informative. While working through the data Dr. Keri Stephens posed questions challenging us to look beyond the numbers and find insights on what those numbers mean to our research. She also teaches how to best approach going through data; advising us to preprocess the data sets in excel first. This is best because having a clean data set at the beginning makes analyzing the data using other programs, like SPSS or R, much smoother.

The most recent data analysis party we hosted was to work through our data for research on employer communication regarding COVID-19. The research hopes to uncover how employees feel about the email messages their employers sent during the COVID-19 Pandemic. We also how to learn how people make sense of the messages they get from their employers and how they discuss these messages with their peers.

OPTIC Lab is looking forward to sharing what we learn from this research. Additionally, we hope that you make data analysis an exciting and educational experience in the future.