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Student and faculty researchers at the College
of Nursing use high-tech tools to find, record, analyze, and manipulate
the most current data from worldwide sources. The Research Resource Center,
also known as the Datalab, is an arm of the Office of Nursing Research.
In the Datalab, computer work stations enable students to learn first-hand
the techniques associated with data manipulation and analysis.
Research associates are available to help master's and doctoral students
use the equipment and software and to help design a coding dictionary
for data, a data-input strategy, and an analysis plan consistent with
their research questions (as directed by their advisory committees).
The
Datalab also accommodates group projects involving computer applications.
Networks:
In addition to College of Nursing computing resources, the computer
stations are connected through a campuswide fiber backbone to the UA's
Center for Computing
and Information Technology and the University Libraries.
Stations are networked to peripherals such as color and high-speed,
duplexing laser printers.
Software available for PC-based statistical manipulation includes
SPSS for Windows, SAS for Windows, Neural Connect, LISREL, PASS
Power Analysis, and more. Software for manipulation of qualitative data
includes ETHNOGRAPH, Martin, Nudist, and more. Additional
software is available to support OCR text scanning and graphic manipulation.
Users
have access to an optical scanner permitting direct data transfer from
data-collection forms to computer files and to graphic pads for computerized
scoring.
For supercomputer-level applications, the Datalab has direct access
to a high
performance computing environment to support large research projects.
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