Artifact 4

ETR 522 Educational Statistics 2: Factors Influencing the Transition to Use of

Online Catalogs By Higher Education Faculty
Introduction and Reflection
The artifact shows above is the final research project for ETR 522 course. This course
prepares students to understand advanced statistical methods such as multiple regression, logistic
regression, ordinal regression, and so on. Also, the course teaches students how to incorporate
these statistical approaches to answer research questions. The reasons for taking ETR 522 course
are to expand my knowledge regarding the use of inferential statistics in educational research as
well as enhance my skills in using SPSS to analysis data. And most importantly is how to
interpret inferential statistics.
The paper presented above is a research paper for ETR 522, which entitled Factors
Influencing the Transition to Use of Online Catalogs By Higher Education Faculty. The purpose
of the study is to evaluate factors that influence higher education faculty to the use of online
catalogs. In this study, the data obtained from research firm named Odyssey. The from research
firm, Odyssey, conducted a survey study that measures attitudes and perceptions of academic
librarians specializing in collection development as well as faculty to gather information about
their transition to using online catalogs as an academic source. A total of 44,218 participants
were selected from a list of faculty members across universities in the United States. Only 9.4%
(N = 4134) of the selected participants responded to the survey. Logistic regression used to best
answer the following research question:
Can the transition to online catalogs among faculty be predicted by the following
variables: the frequency of Internet use and the frequency of personal computer use?

During the data analysis phase, multiple regression and ordinal regression were used,
however, assumptions of these regression tests were violated. As results, logistic regression was
used to best answer the given research question.
The logistic regression results showed that 995 (61.1%) faculty perceived the transition to
using the online catalog as extremely beneficial. Regarding the two predictors (frequency of
Internet and frequency of computer use), they were both found to be statistically significant. The
frequency of Internet use is statistically significant p-value (0.001) < 0.5 and the frequency of
computer use is statistically significant p-value (0.31) < 0.5. The previous literature also
supported these results..

Evidence of Mastery of Objectives 4 and 5

Objective 4, Select appropriate analyses for a given research question: Based on the
nature of the project, it is clearly that objective 4 is met. During the data analysis, I
experienced difficulties in selecting appropriate analysis for this project. However
looking at previous studies as well as counseling with the course instructor, I understood
that analyzing data requires multiple attempts to find the right statistical analysis. Also, I
learned that dealing with an existing dataset that has many cases and missing values
could cause issues during data analysis stage.
Objective 5, Apply appropriate technology to conduct analyses of educational data: The
artifact shown above demonstrates my ability to use and analyzing data using SPSS.
Also, it shows evidence that I have ability to incorporate SPSS outputs such tables and
graphics into the document, which help readers to understand the results emerged from
the data analysis phase.