Too Early
When I was doing my Masters work decades ago we did all of our statistical analysis by hand. I mean not really. We had calculators and spreadsheets but nothing that would take the data and spit out the results. We could hand draw our graphs or have excel create a bar graph, a pie chart or a line drawing. We would cut and paste them into our papers. Often, literally.
When I was doing my Bachelors work, I paid over $600 for a printer and shared with my entire dorm (residence hall, sorry Clint) floor so we didn’t have to walk across campus to the library to print out our papers to turn in. We could use spellcheck but I was told it would make me lazy. I still did it and I loved when it would tell me the grade level of my writing.
This weekend I was working on my Doctoral research, Cycle 1 data is in and it is time to put it in order so I can write about it. Great, exciting, all good. But there is a new program (SPSS, okay not that new) that I don’t know how to use that I have to play with to get the analysis out. But I know how to do it manually (see above). So, I harken back to what do I need to know—mean, standard deviation, coefficient alpha or what they call Cronbach’s alpha. So, I do what any good scholar in 2026 does who can’t figure out how to use a program, I ask AI to explain to me how the program works so I can use it. But meanwhile, I think, wouldn’t it just be easier to do it myself in Excel. I know excel, I love excel, excel has stood by me for most of my adult life. I can create in excel a system so when new research comes in, I can just add to it and my calculations will continue to useful for my writing.
And do you know what AI told me . . . use the system. Use SPSS. Of course, you can compute it on your own but you should use the system, the system is the standard for the research you are doing.
Threshold of 0.7 acceptable reliability. Pre-course contribution alpha affected by missing data.
So, hold on, the machine is telling me the machine is the way to go? Okay, I can get past that point, but what matters more to me is what I just figured out about where we are in the timeline.
AI will be the standard. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But one day. Probably before my undergrads do their doctorates.
So when my professor tells me to include how I use AI on my title page of my paper for Cycle 1, I wonder, really? Should I list that I used a calculator or spell check, or just AI? Should I detail out that I had it explain to me that my x axis in my graph wasn’t labeled appropriately but that I made the graph myself. Should I explain that I use it as a “thought” partner to use my wonderings that I have at the beginning of a project to edit the project. Should I say that I have it audit my citations to make sure I haven’t missed any and when it does it reminds me of an article that I was supposed to read and haven’t yet so I did and added it to my references. Should I also detail out that rather than using SPSS to do my Cronbach’s alpha that I did in fact compute it myself because I didn’t want to figure out SPSS? Or do we just include all that in the actual writing. Do I start to quote AI like a co-researcher?
I get it though. We are in the middle of it. And that can be scary. Remember call waiting and voicemail. My grandmother wouldn’t leave a message, she’d just call back. She didn’t understand when I switched from one call to her and said, can you hold on so I can get off the other line. Invariably, she’d hang up and I’d have to call her back and then she’d tell my mom that I hung up on her. Remember when you could start editing and showing your marks on the computer—was it cheating if I took those suggestions even if it was my mom who made them?
I think we need to do our best work and use the tools that exist in the world—SPSS, AI, word processing, voice to text when they work for us and use our brains the rest of the time. Nowadays even excel will give you 50 different ways to visualize your data—I’m old school, I drew it first the way it made sense to me and then I had it do it and when they matched I felt like I was at a place where I could share it.
I just think that when we make AI so different than all the other tools that have come before we are missing something inherent in all of it—new things are scary sometimes and we have to figure them out for ourselves. And sometimes doing it the old way or the manual way or the hand done way is better, more efficient, or just more comfortable. We get to decide.
And we can be so old that the manual way becomes obsolete and the new technology becomes the norm (Cronbach’s alpha via SPSS, I know.). We just don’t always see it coming so fast and in real time.
*This was written by me typing on keys and talking out loud TO MYSELF not the computer. It is full of thought holes and incomplete notions because I’m actually quite human.
