Analyzing the Data to Find the Results!
Once all the data were collected and put into a spreadsheet, the spreadsheet was converted into a .CSV file and uploaded to a statistics software called RStudio.
You can look through the document of me cleaning and analyzing the data here for more fun bonus content!
Some of the data in my spreadsheet had to be removed. For example, sometimes I recorded behaviors not listed in my ethogram or forgot to record which limb the lemur used. I then decided to categorize the behaviors I observed into different "tasks" (for example, I grouped walking and leaping as "locomotion" tasks). I collected some data on foot use, but it was so little that it was excluded from my analyses. There were even some typos I made that I had to fix. The process of organizing and taking out unusable data is called "data cleaning". I cleaned up the data using both RStudio and Google Sheets until I finally got a shorter, more organized spreadsheet that was ready for analysis.
Once the data were cleaned, I analyzed them in RStudio. This allowed me to make some interesting graphs and perform statistical tests to see how likely it is that the results I got were just by chance. The data cleaning and analysis document has everything I did, but here are some highlights:
Individual lemurs varied with which hand they used more, and 10/12 (83%) used their right hand more often than their left hand. Randy (a male ring-tailed lemur, only grasped with his right hand when I observed him!). Thrax (a male sifaka) and Sophia (a female ring-tailed lemur) were the only lemurs that made more left-hand grasps than right-hand grasps:
I had a hard time figuring out how to do all the statistics I wanted in RStudio, so I also did some statistical tests in a software called JMP. Here is what I got out of that:
- Right-hand use for grasping is more common (p < 0.001)
- Species significantly affects which limb (left or right) the lemurs use (p = 0.0357 for all data, p = 0.0100 for just grasping data)
- Biological sex significantly affects which limb the lemurs use (p = 0.0212) when all data is included. When looking at just hand grasps, however, biological sex is not statistically significant (p = 0.4342).
- Age does not significantly affect which limb the lemurs use (p = 0.8056 for all data, p = 0.4945 for just grasping data). All the lemurs I tested were adults, so the results may have been different if I had included younger lemurs in the study.
Overall, I think there is a lot I could have done differently with this project. Here is my discussion of what I got out of this project and what I would have done differently.