ANY-maze Help > The ANY-maze reference > The Data page > Choosing what data is shown on the Data page > Showing repeated measures in columns

Showing repeated measures in columns

In brief

Usually ANY-maze will show one test (or segment of a test) in each row of the Data page spreadsheet. This creates a nice logical separation between the rows (tests) and the columns (measures), but for some statistical software, such as SPSS and Statistica, this arrangement causes problems when the data includes repeated measures (i.e. multiple trials, or multiple test segments), as these programs need each instance of a repeated measure to be shown in a different column.

To address this, ANY-maze includes specific options to organise the data in this way.

Details

An ANY-maze experiment will include repeated measures if the experiment consists of multiple stages and/or multiple trials, or you choose to divide tests into different segments across time (see Breaking tests into parts using the 'Segment of test' measure).

In programs such as SPSS and Statistica, repeated measures are plotted in columns - so for example, if you have 4 animals and each one was tested in 3 trials and you wanted to analyse the Distance the animals travelled, SPSS would require the data to be organised as 4 rows (one per animal) with 3 columns, one for the distance travelled in the first trial, one for the distance travelled in the second trial and one for the distance travelled in the third trial. The Data page, however, will normally show this data as 12 rows, one per trial, with a single column for distance travelled.

To address this difference, ANY-maze includes two options which can be used to have repeated trials and/or test segments plotted in columns.

Setting repeated measures to be shown in columns

To have repeated measures shown in columns, you need to:

1.

Click the Select data button in the Actions section of the Data page's ribbon bar - this will cause the 'Data settings' page to be shown.

Using these options can have some effects which you may not be expecting. First, choosing the option to Show repeated trials in different columns will cause the Stage and Trial number measures to be removed from the main measures list. This is because these measures are going to be automatically used to divide the data into different columns, so you can't choose whether or not to include them.

Similarly, if you choose the Show test segments in different columns option, then the Segment of test measure will be removed from the main measures list.

How the data is presented when repeated measures are shown in columns

If you select the option to Show repeated trials in different columns, then ANY-maze will organise the data with one Animal per row. It will then include a series of columns for each measure you have chosen to analyse, showing the measure's result for each trial. For example, if each animal was tested in 4 trials and you choose to analyse the Distance travelled and the Maximum speed, you would see four columns for Distance travelled and four for Maximum speed. These would be titled as 1/1 - Distance travelled, 1/2 - Distance travelled, etc. where '1/1' means Stage 1, Trial 1 and '1/2' means Stage 1, Trial 2, and so on.

In some experiments, the animals may not all have had the same number of trials - for example, they might have been trained to achieve some goal, with some animals requiring more trials to achieve the goal than others. In this case ANY-maze will show enough columns for the maximum number of trials any animal received. So, for example, we might have 3 animals, two of which had 3 trials and one of which had 5. In this case, ANY-maze will show 5 columns for each measure, and for the animals that didn't have trials 4 and 5 the data will be shown as #N/A.

If you choose to Show test segments in different columns then the data will be formatted in a similar way - i.e. with one column for each segment, with the number of columns being determined by the longest test duration. In this case the columns are titled as 0-30; Distance travelled, where '0-30' indicates the test segment from time 0 to time 30 seconds.

You can, of course, choose to show both repeated trials and test segments in different columns. In this case, the number of columns per measure will be the maximum number of trials multiplied by the maximum number of time segments. The columns will be titled as 1/1; 0-30; Distance travelled, etc., meaning the distance travelled in the time from 0-30 seconds in the first trial of the first stage.

As you will appreciate, the number of columns shown when data is presented in this way can quickly become quite large, especially if both repeated trials and test segments are plotted in different columns. For example, if an experiment has 4 trials, each of which lasts 5 minutes, and you choose to divide the tests into 30-second segments then for each measure you include, there will be 40 columns.

ANY-maze doesn't have a limit to the number of columns that can be shown, but Windows has a limit to the overall width of the Data page spreadsheet. This limit means that very large numbers of columns cannot be displayed. If the data you select will exceed this limit, then ANY-maze will warn you and will only actually include the columns that fit - even if you asked for more.

A final point - not all measures relate to individual trials. For example, the animal Treatments are specific to animals and not to trials, and therefore these measures will only ever be shown in a single column, even if repeated measures are shown in separate columns.

See also:

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ANY-maze help topic T0881