An email discussion about the appropriate percentage effort on research grants has produced a lot of interesting discussions. One person raised an interesting question. The typical data analysis, he claimed, might involve a few hours reviewing the input data set, a few hours conducting the analysis and a few hours preparing a statistical summary, but even after a generous estimate of the work at each of the time points, he could only come up with 22 hours of effort, which corresponds roughly with a 1% FTE. I wrote back describing some of the things that might occur before the data analysis that might add time to this effort. Continue reading →