More details

I have had extensive experience of analysing data, writing reports as a Research Assistant in Departments of History, and sometimes in other roles, for instance in work with ‘SWPTI’ where I helped to summarise call centre statistics. I am very familiar with the use of queries, especially updating, aggregating and cross tabulations, in Access, and with the use of pivot tables in Excel. I have also analysed data in more unusual software, for instance - SPSS in a number of different versions. Quite a few years ago, I used Quattro-Pro and R:Base, and I have also programmed in Fortran and Visual Basic. I have used SPSS extensively, from the days when it would be used on an University main frame to usage on a PC and to the powerful versions that use both scripts and visual systems to handle the data. Often the work would need large amounts of data to be aggregated and files joined together. On a Research Project at the University of Exeter, I was pleased to be able to devise a system whereby numeric values could be generated which represented the likelihood that a particular Parish/Poor Law Union could be sending this number of patients to the Devon Lunatic Asylum by chance or whether that number was more or less than could be expected. In this way a map of Devon could be shaded in so that the propensity of different areas of Devon to send lunatics to the Asylum could be seen and by this means an inverse relationship was observed - in other words, if somebody was behaving strangely in Barnstaple they were less likely to end up in the Asylum than if they lived nearby. Another usage for SPSS skills was to run a program that ran on Census data for 1881 in Devon and which was able to furnish numbers on the kinds of families, (single, ‘normal’, extended, etc.) that the households were comprised of.

---