Remote booking guidance

Please use the booking form. 

1. Please answer the question “What area of mathematics/statistics do you require help with?” in as much detail as possible. For example, “I need help with performing t tests in SPSS”, rather than just “SPSS”.
2. After booking, please ensure that you have the Teams invitation in your email or calendar. If you can’t see it, that could be because your email address contained a typo. If you can’t see the invitation, please email mlsc@lboro.ac.uk well in advance to sort it out.
3. If you realise that you no longer require the session, then please cancel it, to enable other students to make use of the slot. See here if you aren’t sure how to cancel your booking.

For mathematics-related queries:

1. Try to form clearly in your mind beforehand what your question is.
   • It may be helpful to write this down on paper.
   • Are you stuck on a particular question or do you have more general difficulties across a particular topic area? Try to be as specific as possible.

2. Check that the tutor has the relevant expertise to deal with your question.
3. Come prepared to show the tutor your attempts at solving the question(s) or your work on the area(s) you are struggling to understand.
4. Bring any relevant lecture notes or books with you.

For statistics-related queries:

1. Try to form clearly in your mind beforehand what your question is.
   • It may be helpful to write this down on paper.
   • Are you struggling to carry out a particular analysis or do you not know what kind of analysis you should perform? Try to be as specific as possible about your research question(s) and/or hypotheses. What is the goal of your analysis? For example, are you comparing means or examining the level of association between two variables?

2. Check that the tutor has the relevant expertise to deal with your question.
3. Bring your dataset(s) with you and come prepared to show the tutor your attempts at analysis so far or what is causing you problems.
4. Ensure that your data set is already ‘cleaned’, unless this is the issue you wish to focus on. Please see below for advice on ‘data cleaning’.
5. Bring any relevant lecture notes or books with you.
6. Find out if your course or supervisor has a preference over what statistical software you should use.

Data cleaning

The data cleaning necessary will be dependent on the type of analysis you want run, but here are some guidelines:

1. Make a copy of your data and in this new copy remove all of the variables you do not want to investigate and which are irrelevant to your analysis.
2. If you are creating a scale by combining the responses to several questions/items, it may be helpful to do that in a separate file and bring both with you. If you are exporting data from OnlineSurveys (BOS), tick the option “Combine scale/rank values into a single column where possible” (see pages 2-3 in here). If your separate items are in SPSS, this video shows you what to do.