Statistics Help plz

[WasabiPoptart]

It's been long enough since I last had to us stats that I've forgotten a lot.

I'm doing a project. It's supposed to be a proposal for a program evaluation at a women's shelter. One thing we want to show is which services are helping women the most. That makes my dependent variable successful completion of the shelter's program.
They offer 5 stand alone services in the program. The women can choose to participate in any combination of them. So my independent variables could look like this:

A, B, C...
A+B, A+C, and so on...
A+B+C, and so on...
A+B+C+D, and so on...
A+B+C+D+E

We're already (hypothetically) collecting the data from the agency's records, so we can see what services clients participated in and who had a successful outcome. That's going in a table which shows how many successful clients participated in X number of services, where X is 1 - 5.

I really don't want to write out a table listing every possible combination. So if I can say we're going to run *this analysis* to find the combination that works best, it will give my professor the information she's looking for. I'm just not sure what it would be. What analysis do I run to find which variables alone or in conjunction are contributing most to successful outcomes in the program?


I thought at first it should be a correlation, but I think that's what I'd run once I determine which program or combination is leading to success to prove the correlation with a successful outcome.
Now I'm looking at factor analysis or multi-level modeling. I'm pretty sure it can't be an ANOVA since the independent variables aren't in categories like gender or age.

Help?

 

[jwhouk]

Wow. If I had some time, I think I might be able to come up with something helpful, but I don't.

Suggestion: break down your overall goal into pieces, determine what you want to measure, and then run a meaningful and appropriate statistical analysis on that. Build it back up toward your main goal.

If that doesn't make sense, blame the lack of sleep on my end. :durr

 

[MindDetective]

I recommend a multiple regression analysis. You could do a five way factorial anova but the number of groups is very large in that case. Let's chat in message when I am not on my phone.

 

[WasabiPoptart]

I recommend a multiple regression analysis.

That is what I'm looking for! I don't need to actually do the analysis or write anything more than we're using a specific statistical analysis to show which services work best. If you still want to chat, great! Otherwise I have all that I need

 

[MindDetective]

Okay, sound good!

 

[WasabiPoptart]

Wow. If I had some time, I think I might be able to come up with something helpful, but I don't.

Suggestion: break down your overall goal into pieces, determine what you want to measure, and then run a meaningful and appropriate statistical analysis on that. Build it back up toward your main goal.

If that doesn't make sense, blame the lack of sleep on my end. :durr

It's ok. I couldn't even spell statistics right.

 

[WasabiPoptart]

So she says we don't have enough cases in our sample to use a regression. FFS this is a small, church-run agency, not a major non-profit. It was suggested we use a bivariate analysis. I cannot imagine having to run that as a 5-way ANOVA. I'm going to back to just saying what results we're looking for (a specific combination of services that contribute to a successful outcome) instead of exactly what test will get us the result. No one else put the name of a statistical analysis method in their presentation, so it won't matter if we don't have it either.

 

[jwhouk]

I would give a hug rating if I wasn't on Tapatalk at the moment.

 

[WasabiPoptart]

I hugged you for the thought.

 

[MindDetective]

So she says we don't have enough cases in our sample to use a regression. FFS this is a small, church-run agency, not a major non-profit. It was suggested we use a bivariate analysis. I cannot imagine having to run that as a 5-way ANOVA. I'm going to back to just saying what results we're looking for (a specific combination of services that contribute to a successful outcome) instead of exactly what test will get us the result. No one else put the name of a statistical analysis method in their presentation, so it won't matter if we don't have it either.

Yeah, number of cases would be important. That's also true for running a complicated factorial design. Ultimately, the problem is that with that many variables, you need to have a crap load of observations. The solution for a small organization like this would probably be to make it longitudinal so that you could gather a lot more observations over many years. If you are talking about a small-scale study, you shrink the number of conditions/variables to make it more manageable as a bivariate analysis (such as only focus on two interventions).