It is now, let’s see, a little more than 38 hours until my term paper in “Social Scientific Method” is due, and I feel I’m on course. Even though it’s only eight hours or so since I started working on it.

Because today I flipped through a couple of term papers in this course from the last semester, and I discovered that I only needed some one, one and an half pages of empirically based (of course; this is university) theory for each of the independent variables I’ll eventually use in a binary logistic regression analysis with the purpose of explaning my dependent variable. I’m still a little annoyed that the income variable in the data set we’re using was useless (too many respondents were coded as missing), and that the second best income variable is “Proportion of household income respondent provides“. But hey, even if it’s not directly the variable I initially wanted to examine, it’s an indicator, and when I’ve recoded it (into a dummy variable, I might add! :D ) to exclude single and possibly also unemployed respondents, I imagine it will be quite servicable.

But back to my optimism. I just concluded that I have enough theory to cover two of the three required independent variables — gender and years of education — and that I’ll probably find enough theory in a book I already own to finally decide whether to use “Total hours normally worked per week in main job overtime included” (which I’ve run a frequency analysis of already, and found, much to my delight, that it has an average of 37,5 hours! Imagine that, that the average number of hours 1760 people work every week, is exactly 37,5!) or “Year of birth” recoded into “Age“, as my third independent variable. I’m guessing I might have between two and four hours of reading before I’m finished with the theory.

I can’t, however, begin to write immediately after that. This is after all a methodology course, so I’ll need to freshen up on the method (reliablility, validity, operationalisation, population, generalisation, selection, type 1 and type 2 errors, table analysis with Chi Square Tests, standard deviations, and so on) before getting down to business (not to mention that I should probably run a couple of data analyses first, too). But all in all, this shouldn’t take me more than 8-10 hours. So even if I have to go to Dragvoll campus sometime tomorrow to search for one last article, I’ll probably be ready to begin writing around midnight tomorrow. Meaning that I’ll have 15 hours to write the paper. Which should be more than enough, seeing as I make so detalied notes while reading that I basically just have to piece those together.

So yay for me! I thought it’d be harder to finish this time (and, the Gods forbid, it might still be), but introductionary courses on university levels? Not that hard, if you’ve already taken a few of them.

Now, lets just hope that my DnD group’s DM doesn’t decide to go to Belgium this weekend. Because if he does, I’ll have cancelled my plans to meet my family for no reason at all. Which would be kinds cool, seeing as it could be interpreted as a result of karma, but also kinda not.

(Oh, and I just got spammed by a bot telling me about a couple of thousand ways I could (or should?) undergo “cosmetic surgery”. Was it trying to drop me a hint?)

(Oh and, part II: In case there’s any of you who didn’t quite catch what I’m writing about, but wanna know (for some incomprehensible reason), my main hypothesis is that gender is a determinant for your wage level. My secondary and tertiary hypotheses is that education and either age or how much you work influences how much money you make. Far from an ideal model, what with the lacking income variable and all, but what the hey. How hard can it be not to fubar this one?)