Re: [R] Questionnaire Analysis virtually without continuous Variables

2012-08-04 Thread R. Michael Weylandt
On Sat, Aug 4, 2012 at 9:12 AM, Sacha Viquerat
dawa.ya.m...@googlemail.com wrote:
 Hello!
 I am doing an analysis on a questionnaire of hunters taken in 4 different
 districts of some mysterious foreign country. The aim of the study was to
 gather info on the factors that determine the hunting success of a
 peculiarly beautiful bird in that area. All variables are factors, i.e. they
 are variables such as Use of Guns - yes / no, Use of Dogs - yes / no and
 the likes. The response is upposed to be number of Birds caught, which was
 designed to be the only continuous variable. However, in reality the number
 of caught birds is between 0 and 1, sometimes hunters answered with 2.
 Unfortunately, it is not the questioner who is burdened with the analysis,
 but me. I am struggling to find an appropriate approach to the analysis. I
 don't really consider this as count data, since it would be very vulnerable
 to overinflation (and a steep decline for counts above 0). I can't really
 suggest binomial models either, since the lack of explanatory, continuous
 data renders such an approach quite vague. I also struggle with the random
 design of the survey (households nested within villages nested within
 districts). Adding to that, hunters don't even target the bird as their
 prime objective. The bird is essentially a by-catch, most often used for
 instant consumption on the hunting trip. I therefore doubt that any analysis
 makes more than a little sense, but I will not yet succumb to failure. Any
 ideas?

 Thanks in advance!


Hi Sacha,

This sounds a good deal like homework to me (some mysterious foreign
country) and this list has a no homework policy so unfortunately, I
don't think you'll be able to get much help here.

Best of luck with your analysis however!

Michael


 PS: I just realized that this is not a question related to R but to
 statistics in general. Apologies for that!

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Re: [R] Questionnaire Analysis virtually without continuous Variables

2012-08-04 Thread Joshua Wiley
 Hi Sacha,

You're right that this is not an R related question really (would be better 
somewhere like crossvalidated.com).

If basically everyone catches 0/1 birds, then I would consider dichotomizing:

Y - as.integer(caught = 1)

then check cross tabs to make sure there are no zero cells between predictors 
and outcome:

xtabs(~Y + dogs + guns, data=yourdata)

then use the glmer() function to model the nested random effects.

m - glmer(Y ~ dog + gun + (1 | household) + (1 | village) + (1 | district), 
data = yourdata, family=binomial)

summary(m)

Cheers,

Josh

On Aug 4, 2012, at 7:12, Sacha Viquerat dawa.ya.m...@googlemail.com wrote:

 Hello!
 I am doing an analysis on a questionnaire of hunters taken in 4 different 
 districts of some mysterious foreign country. The aim of the study was to 
 gather info on the factors that determine the hunting success of a peculiarly 
 beautiful bird in that area. All variables are factors, i.e. they are 
 variables such as Use of Guns - yes / no, Use of Dogs - yes / no and the 
 likes. The response is upposed to be number of Birds caught, which was 
 designed to be the only continuous variable. However, in reality the number 
 of caught birds is between 0 and 1, sometimes hunters answered with 2. 
 Unfortunately, it is not the questioner who is burdened with the analysis, 
 but me. I am struggling to find an appropriate approach to the analysis. I 
 don't really consider this as count data, since it would be very vulnerable 
 to overinflation (and a steep decline for counts above 0). I can't really 
 suggest binomial models either, since the lack of explanatory, continuous 
 data renders such an!
  approach quite vague. I also struggle with the random design of the survey 
(households nested within villages nested within districts). Adding to that, 
hunters don't even target the bird as their prime objective. The bird is 
essentially a by-catch, most often used for instant consumption on the hunting 
trip. I therefore doubt that any analysis makes more than a little sense, but I 
will not yet succumb to failure. Any ideas?
 
 Thanks in advance!
 
 PS: I just realized that this is not a question related to R but to 
 statistics in general. Apologies for that!
 
 __
 R-help@r-project.org mailing list
 https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
 PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
 and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.

__
R-help@r-project.org mailing list
https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.


Re: [R] Questionnaire Analysis virtually without continuous Variables

2012-08-04 Thread Joshua Wiley
You may be able to get around zero cells using a an MCMC approach such as with 
MCMCglmm.

On Aug 4, 2012, at 15:30, Sacha Viquerat dawa.ya.m...@googlemail.com wrote:

 On 08/04/2012 07:57 PM, Joshua Wiley wrote:
  Hi Sacha,
 
 You're right that this is not an R related question really (would be better 
 somewhere like crossvalidated.com).
 
 If basically everyone catches 0/1 birds, then I would consider dichotomizing:
 
 Y - as.integer(caught = 1)
 
 then check cross tabs to make sure there are no zero cells between 
 predictors and outcome:
 
 xtabs(~Y + dogs + guns, data=yourdata)
 
 then use the glmer() function to model the nested random effects.
 
 m - glmer(Y ~ dog + gun + (1 | household) + (1 | village) + (1 | district), 
 data = yourdata, family=binomial)
 
 summary(m)
 
 Cheers,
 
 Josh
 
 On Aug 4, 2012, at 7:12, Sacha Viquerat dawa.ya.m...@googlemail.com wrote:
 
 Hello!
 I am doing an analysis on a questionnaire of hunters taken in 4 different 
 districts of some mysterious foreign country. The aim of the study was to 
 gather info on the factors that determine the hunting success of a 
 peculiarly beautiful bird in that area. All variables are factors, i.e. 
 they are variables such as Use of Guns - yes / no, Use of Dogs - yes / 
 no and the likes. The response is upposed to be number of Birds caught, 
 which was designed to be the only continuous variable. However, in reality 
 the number of caught birds is between 0 and 1, sometimes hunters answered 
 with 2. Unfortunately, it is not the questioner who is burdened with the 
 analysis, but me. I am struggling to find an appropriate approach to the 
 analysis. I don't really consider this as count data, since it would be 
 very vulnerable to overinflation (and a steep decline for counts above 0). 
 I can't really suggest binomial models either, since the lack of 
 explanatory, continuous data renders such !
 an approach quite vague. I also struggle with the random design of the survey 
(households nested within villages nested within districts). Adding to that, 
hunters don't even target the bird as their prime objective. The bird is 
essentially a by-catch, most often used for instant consumption on the hunting 
trip. I therefore doubt that any analysis makes more than a little sense, but I 
will not yet succumb to failure. Any ideas?
 
 Thanks in advance!
 
 PS: I just realized that this is not a question related to R but to 
 statistics in general. Apologies for that!
 
 __
 R-help@r-project.org mailing list
 https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
 PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
 and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
 I did exactly what you proposed already (since the binomial model seemed 
 obvious to me), however, of course there are zero cells. I was thinking 
 someone more accustomed to doing questionnaire analysis could unveil some 
 mysterious approach common to sociologists but occluded from the naturalists 
 eyes (hardened after years of dealing with exact science ;)
 I think I will expand the binomial approach and just try to find fancy 
 graphics that make up for the low value of the actual results (maybe with 
 colours). :D
 Thank you for the reply (do they really give such tasks for homework these 
 days? These kids must be awesome statisticians!)
 

__
R-help@r-project.org mailing list
https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.