Running out of adjectives

One of the problems that we have when trying to measure things like trauma or depression is that we run out of adjectives very fast.

For example, we might ask:
How upset were you that your computer crashed?
- Very upset.
How upset were you that your dog died?
- Very, very upset.
How upset were you that your spouse and children were killed in the volcano?
- Very, very, very upset.
How upset are you that a large asteroid is going to wipe out all of life on earth next week?

Banyard and Shevlin wrote a short paper a few years ago which reported high levels of psychological distress in supporters of football (soccer) teams that were demoted. I've always suspected that this effect is simply one of people using extremes - they were very, very upset that that goal was disallowed.

My favorite blog written by an anonymous ER doctor is WhiteCoatRants, and in this post he describes a similar problem when trying to get a patient to describe how much pain they are in:

The one [description] I use is that 10 out of 10 pain is pain that is bad enough that you are “on the ground wailing and pounding your fists on the floor because the pain is so bad.” This gives me an objective way to follow up the subjective ratings of “10.”

“So using my description, how bad is your pain from 1-10?”
The patient, sitting on the bed munching Doritos and watching TV, says “Oh, it’s definitely a 10.”
I reply, “That’s funny, because you’re still sitting on the bed, you’re not pounding your fists on the floor, and you’re not wailing. In fact, you appear to be rather comfortable.”
The usual response?

“Oh, then it’s a nine and a half.”

Some interesting discussion about this problem followed.

Google for Statistics

I like to use Google to conduct little surveys on how things are done, or what people think. For example, I was thinking about what the relative popularity of SPSS and SAS were for teaching statistics to psychologists, in UK and US universities. So I searched for
[SAS psychology anova site:edu] and got (about) 10,000 hits.
[SPSS psychology anova site:edu] 6,000 hits.
(I added anova to make sure it didn't pick up other meanings for SAS). Conclusion: SPSS is a little more popular than SAS, in US university psychology departments. (I also ran it with 'regression' instead of 'anova', with a similar result, but SPSS's lead was a lot smaller).

Do it again for the UK and we find:
[SAS psychology anova site:ac.uk] 607 hits.
[SPSS psychology anova site:ac.uk] 1,930 hits.

So SPSS has the lead in both, but it's got a bigger lead in the UK than the US. (For regression, it's also got about three times more).

However, here's a comic from xkcd which uses the same approach in a much more interesting way: