FAQs for Graduate Students

The services we provide include, but are not necessarily limited to:

• Planning at the sampling or data collection phase of a study, including assistance in formulation of research questions to which statistical methods can be applied.  
• Assistance in setting up a survey for data collection using Qualtrics.
• EXCEL Templates for data entry.
• Data analysis and/or explanation of analysis results.
• Helping you understand your results as you prepare your project write-up or presentation.
• Advice on statistical methods and statistical software (should you plan to do most of the work yourself).
  

There are certain services we do not provide. 

• We do not provide tutoring for courses.  
• We do not provide manuscript writing (beyond our standard report) for students when the consultation relates directly to their degree.  Remember that we are trained as statisticians.  We have no formal training at all within your discipline.  Therefore, while we will prepare and help you understand a statistical report for your data, we are not able to actively help in the writing of your dissertation, project report, etc.  You are welcome to pull from the report we provide in whatever manner you deem appropriate.  
• While we will help you with a data template or with a Qualtrics survey, we do not provide data entry services.  If you are using a paper survey that is fine, but you will need to enter the data into an EXCEL template file that we can provide.
• Our assistance to students may be further limited based on the preferences of their advisor/mentor when such a request is made in writing to the director of the center.  

 

Any graduate student may use our services, though NKU students are provided with a lower cost.  Graduate students requesting services should completely fill out this service request form.  The better the initial information you are able to provide, the better we will likely to be able to assist you.

While many students have had at least one course in statistics somewhere along the way, we find that most projects can benefit from a thorough review by a professional statistician.  This is best accomplished BEFORE you start collecting data.  We can provide a brief review of your study design and/or analysis plans. We can often make suggestions that may help improve your statistical technique and also your chances of future publication. 

Normally, we schedule Zoom meetings during regular business hours.  Meetings are scheduled with NKU Statistics Faculty, therefore scheduling is subject to availability within their individual schedules. 

During the summer session, meeting availability is generally limited to one day per week (Thursday).  The BCC is closed for the entirety of winter break and for the two weeks prior to the beginning of the fall semester, as well as during other specified NKU breaks. 

During all breaks we do typically try to at least keep up with e-mail communications during times we are closed, though the expected response time is measured in days rather than hours.  

We do not.  As our schedules are varied, most of our work with clients is by appointment. You are welcome to drop by (or call) unannounced but should be aware that we may not be able to provide immediate assistance unless all you need is some quick advice. Graduate students with projects new to the center are always expected to fill out the graduate student consultation request form.

We attempt to assist with all projects that fall within the scope of the center.  However, this cannot be guaranteed.  Due to staff limitations and/or demand, there may be times when we cannot get to your project as soon as you may need us to.  This is especially true if you come last minute.  Projects deemed to be outside the scope of our services will be declined.  Finally, we have at times seen issues with data integrity.  Center staff reserve the right to refuse service on any project for which, in their opinion, data have not been ethically collected.

Yes.  NKU graduate students pay $60 prior to their initial consultation meeting.  This pays for the initial meeting, plus up to two hours of service following that meeting.  If additional work is needed beyond two hours, this will be discussed with the student client and billed at the $30/hour rate. 

Graduate students from other universities pay $100 prior to their initial consultation meeting.  This pays for the initial meeting, plus up to two hours of service following that meeting.  If additional work is needed beyond two hours, this will be discussed with the student client and billed at the $35/hour rate.  

After we receive your request for a consultation, you will generally be contacted at the email you supply within 1-3 business days (if you don’t, please feel free to send a follow-up email to bcc@nku.edu). Assuming that your request falls within the scope of BCC services, we will arrange an initial consultation meeting (virtually, using Zoom) of approximately 30 minutes in length (see below for how to prepare for that meeting).  We will also send you an invoice for services that must be paid before that meeting takes place.  

Once you have data, you will follow up with us via email for analysis and we will generate a report containing the statistical analysis of your data.  

The length varies, but typically ranges from 20 to 30 minutes. 

Ideally prior to the initial meeting, please provide us with as much information as you can regarding your project. Much of this should be given when you fill out the graduate student service request form. If you have preliminary ideas on how you will collect data, it is useful for us to hear about those before the meeting. Or if you already have data, it can also be useful for us to have seen that prior to the initial meeting (please make sure to remove personal identifiers before sending it to us). 

At the initial meeting, our goals will be to identify your research goals and the ways in which we can help you meet them. It will help if you are prepared to:

• Briefly describe your problem
• Discuss your research goals (what questions do you hope to answer?)
• Discuss variables that you plan to measure and analyze
• Discuss your progress with the project to date
• Determine what types of assistance we may be able to provide. 

Most importantly, please feel free to ask questions! If you don’t understand something, please ask. We will do the same of you. We are not experts in your field, so we may need to ask you several questions in order to understand the project.

 

Once you have data, you follow up with us and send it via email.  We will analyze and provide a statistical report on the data.  As work progresses, we may schedule additional meetings as needed for clarification and/or explanation of results.

Let us know what change(s) you have made, however small they seem to be. You can do that with a simple email message. Even the smallest modification can lead to a major change in the way your data should be collected. We may be able to handle the modifications through e-mail, or perhaps we will need to schedule an additional meeting. If you change your research topic completely, please fill out another consultation request form on our website and we will treat it as a new project.

It can be a substantial time (and cost) saver if your data is submitted in a ready-to-analyze form. In most situations this means a single Excel spreadsheet in which columns represent variables to be analyzed and rows represent single observations. We can assist you in developing the form of the spreadsheet.  We can also design the spreadsheet to help ensure the accuracy of your data.  Or, if you use Qualtrics for a survey we can pull the dataset directly from Qualtrics once your participants have finished their surveys.  

This varies from project to project, but for graduate student projects we can often complete work on your projects within 1 to 2 weeks of receiving data.  It does sometimes depend on the complexity of the analysis, how many projects we are working on at the same time, the cleanliness of your data structure (i.e. correctly built EXCEL file free of data entry errors), and how many consultants we have working in the BCC at that time.

To error on the side of caution, please allow up to 6 weeks (exclusive of university breaks) from initial request to the point in time at which you need things to be done.  We'll do things more quickly than that when we can.

For graduate students, our report including the results is created is typically provided as a Microsoft Word document and e-mailed to you as an attachment. We document the methods being used (including any data restructuring), and provide statistical analysis including the statistical meaning of results. We try to help you understand their practical application as well, however please keep in mind we are not trained in your discipline and so it is ultimately up to you to determine what parts are most relevant and interesting. 

Generally this service is not offered for graduate students.  If work is to be published beyond a dissertation, there is potential we could be involved.  This would need to involve conversations with a students' faculty mentor and co-authorship (including for our student consultant) would be expected. 

We will certainly do that by request. We can set up another Zoom meeting or sometimes simply answer questions by email.  Of course we do have to invoice for this time in the event that it exceeds the pre-paid two hour window..

Also, sometimes after you have a chance to think about the analysis and results, you may also find that you have additional questions or you would like additional analyses. Please don’t hesitate to ask questions.  All of the faculty members who work in the BCC are also teachers, so we are used to answering such questions, and we really enjoy this "teaching" aspect of the consultation process. Please feel free to contact us. We are happy to help.

To varying degrees, we support SAS, Minitab, SPSS, StatCrunch, and R.  It is also typical to use EXCEL to collect and contain the data.  We try to accommodate the preferences of a client when it is reasonable to do so.  However, we also often recommend a particular software according to the analyses that are needed. 

It is important to properly acknowledge the contributions of the BCC when you publish your work.  Please refer to our final report, which will contain a section on the last page regarding how best to provide this acknowledgment.

The BCC serves as an important training ground for Undergraduate Statistics majors to gain experience in statistical consulting. Students always work under the guidance of a faculty mentor in order to ensure quality of work. That faculty mentor will have carefully reviewed the analysis and final report before it is sent.