Statistics Support

Getting help with statistics in SBOHVM

There are two main ways to get help with statistics (or quantitative analysis more generally) in SBOHVM: email and drop-in help/advice meetings. These stats support services are available to anyone doing research in SBOHVM, including L4 honours project students, Masters students, PhD students, and research staff.

Single email address for stats support queries. If you send a description of your problem to sbohvm-stats-support@glasgow.ac.uk, one of us will get back to you and try to help you. The email will only go to the stats support team.  

Twice-weekly drop-in stats support meetings. These are drop-in zoom sessions where you can come along and ask for help. There are two sessions, Monday 10:00-11:00 and Thursday 16:00-17:00, which both use this zoom link: https://uofglasgow.zoom.us/j/466632808. These details are also available in the SBOHVM calendar. There are no appointments, just join the zoom call at the start of the hour and we will try to spend some time with you before the end of the hour. The amount of time allotted to each advisee will depend on how many drop in, but you’ll almost certainly get at least 20 minutes, and you can always come back if you need more help.

Spatial Mondays. On the first Monday of every month there will be a special stats support session focussing on spatial modelling and the use of GIS tools (both in R and QGIS) to retrieve and extract useful spatial data for your analyses (e.g. NDVI, climatic and meteorological variables, land cover, geomorphological variables), and/or to produce figures and maps of publication standard. We encourage those with spatial analysis questions to attend these sessions. Non-spatial statistics problems will still be addressed at these sessions.  

Important: How (and how not) to use SBOHVM stats support

  • The aim of these stats support services is to help students and staff who have run into statistical or other quantitative problems (e.g. in study design, data analysis, modelling) that you haven’t been able to solve by other reasonable means (e.g. supervisor, nearby colleagues, google). Please try to exhaust other means before coming to us, to prevent the service being overwhelmed. However, if you have made reasonable efforts to solve the problem and still need help, you’re welcome!
  • For students, the primary responsibility for providing stats support lies with your supervisor. Before you attend, make sure you have fully discussed the problem with your supervisor. If your supervisor would like to attend the stats sessions with you, that would be fine — in fact we encourage it, as it’ll make it easier for the supervisor to incorporate our advice into your ongoing supervision. 
  • For L4 and Masters students: 
    • These services are not for getting help with routine assessed work.
    • We won’t prioritise advising on problems that fall centrally within the scope of existing courses. If you are really stuck, you can try us, but we encourage students to review course materials, read the additional books etc suggested for your course, use peer support, etc, before coming to us for help.