One sociological theory, Actor Network Theory (ANT) explores how sociopolitical changes are shaped by actors but always within networks with power dynamics, and suggests that actors aren’t always humans, they can bugs (coronavirii?) or technologies (Newcomen’s steam engine, Watt’s addition of the external condenser, the car, the computer). My own view is that the evolution of statistical software has shaped our fields.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the early 20th Century “computers” were people doing longhand calculations or more often, calculations assisted by simple adding machines or slide rules. (At school in the late 1960s I loved our linear slide rules but I was proud to have inherited a cylindrical slide rule, I think from my paternal grandfather, he and it long gone sadly.) There’s a whole sociological side of those networks of humans doing computing and historical exploration, and recognition of their gender (and colour in the USA) has emerged in the last decade or two. However, the electronic computer, the “computer” as we now know it changed all that: it ran software programs and a new unsung or undersung cadre, again mostly of women, moved from being the computers to programming them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If you had access to a computer, and the right code, statistical analyses like a factor analysis, that would have taken a research worker working alone perhaps a week to complete, could be done in an hour. Now that factor analysis even with many variables and perhaps tens of thousands of participants’ data completes on a laptop so fast you hardly notice a pause. Then the exact method to use was often dictated by what was most efficient in terms of computer resources, now so much is known about computational efficiency that whole types of factor analyses have essentially disappeared, replaced by ones that have various advantages even though they may be less computationally efficient.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
However, the analyses still needed to be programmed and in an appropriate language, say FORTRAN or later C, or C++. This programming was still the province of very skilled individuals (and largely still is and underpins all our “statistical software”. The game changer was the emergence of packages of statistical software. Since the early 1980s I have used many different packages (see Statistical software I have used!<\/a>) I’ve also used a few systems specific to particular tasks such the ones dedicated to factor analysis and more general “latent variable modelling” including LISREL<\/a> and AMOS<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Each package had particular strengths and weaknesses and mapped to particular application area. If you follow to that other entry her you can see a bit more about that. For most of the last forty to fifty years SPSS has been the dominant package for psychology and mental health. I suspect its (often excellent) manuals all written my Marija M. Norusis in the early days, and what it did and didn’t do, shaped much of what quantitative research happened.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Until the emergence of SAS\/IML, S-plus and R each package offered a menu of statistical analyses it could do for you. To some extent that’s still true of all statistical software systems: you can do what the programmers and designers have built into the system. However, what has changed is that new systems, particularly R, the one I use for everything now, still have specific functions and packages of functions but they don’t work in a “pick from the menu” fashion, they expect you think through what you want to do not just pull options down from one overarching menu. Some, R again, don’t have that overarching menu at all. To some extent this means that write code to get what you want done, but for most typical data crunching papers in our field, all the challenging programming has been done for you, you just use the system’s grammar and vocabulary to get done what you need. This is transformative in many ways: it generally allows us to do things beyond what the system’s programmers created for us, it makes it easy for us to create new functions and analyses (for me, these can be quite powerful ones even though I’m no programmer) and above all, it encourages us to think carefully about what we want done.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In these ways the new systems are actors starting, sadly only slowly, to transform how we analyse our data and encouraging not just to click on some menu options. They also make it vastly easier for us to share our code so that others can see exactly what we did (difficult if you use spreadsheets for data analysis and impossible if you use a menu system like SPSS).<\/p>\n\n\n\n The other transformative thing about the R project is that it’s open source: entirely free of licence fees (which are steep for commercial systems). Try to transfer to it if you haven’t, teach it to your students if you teach!<\/p>\n\n\n\n Open source software<\/a> Use of statistical software is implied in Chapter 8 and you can’t analyse service level data without it. In fact unless your client numbers are tiny even single handed practitioners will probably need statistical software, or someone who can use that software to analyse their own data …<\/p>\n\n\n\n … I hope my developing shiny server<\/a> will make some analyses possible for practitioners and services who don’t need to become researchers and who don’t have access to statisticians. We (self and Professor Clara Paz, currently in UDLA ( First created 17.viii.23, fairly radical overhaul 30.x.26 to 1.xi.26.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" One sociological theory, Actor Network Theory (ANT) explores how sociopolitical changes are shaped by actors but always within networks with power dynamics, and suggests that actors aren’t always humans, they can bugs (coronavirii?) or technologies (Newcomen’s steam engine, Watt’s addition of the external condenser, the car, the computer). My own view is that the evolution … Continue reading Statistical software and Actor Network Theory<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"doc_category":[18],"doc_tag":[],"glossaries":[],"knowledge_base":[],"class_list":["post-3331","docs","type-docs","status-publish","hentry","doc_category-om-book"],"year_month":"2026-11","word_count":934,"total_views":"1126","reactions":{"happy":"0","normal":"0","sad":"0"},"author_info":{"name":"chris","author_nicename":"chris","author_url":"https:\/\/www.psyctc.org\/psyctc\/author\/chris\/"},"doc_category_info":[{"term_name":"All OM book glossary entries","term_url":"https:\/\/www.psyctc.org\/psyctc\/glossary\/non-knowledgebase\/om-book\/"}],"doc_tag_info":[],"knowledge_base_info":[],"knowledge_base_slug":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.psyctc.org\/psyctc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/docs\/3331","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.psyctc.org\/psyctc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/docs"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.psyctc.org\/psyctc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/docs"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.psyctc.org\/psyctc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.psyctc.org\/psyctc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3331"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.psyctc.org\/psyctc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/docs\/3331\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5567,"href":"https:\/\/www.psyctc.org\/psyctc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/docs\/3331\/revisions\/5567"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.psyctc.org\/psyctc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3331"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"doc_category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.psyctc.org\/psyctc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/doc_category?post=3331"},{"taxonomy":"doc_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.psyctc.org\/psyctc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/doc_tag?post=3331"},{"taxonomy":"glossaries","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.psyctc.org\/psyctc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/glossaries?post=3331"},{"taxonomy":"knowledge_base","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.psyctc.org\/psyctc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/knowledge_base?post=3331"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Try also<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
MarBar system
SPSS<\/a>
Statistical software I have used<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\nChapters<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Online resources<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Universidad de Las Am\u00e9ricas, Quito in Ecuador) hope to make that even easier by allowing the analyses to use data from MarBar<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\nDates<\/h4>\n\n\n\n