Richard Ristow: One is I get a plain kick out of helping people. I even get a kick out of somebody’s stopping me on the streets of Providence and I can give them the right directions. And I like it when somebody posts to the list, “Thank you. You really helped.” It makes a big piece of my day. By participating in the List, I learn techniques, nuances and aspects of SPSS that wouldn’t have come up in my work, or which wouldn’t have come up from the same point of view in my work. And I share the librarian’s thrill at finding for someone else what they need or want to know.

King Douglas: Say we are coming to you for help with an SPSS problem. What’s the best way for us to frame our question?

Richard Ristow: It's like asking for help of any kind: tell me what you have, and what you want. If you're stuck on a small piece of a large problem, tell me about the large problem, too; maybe it's better to bypass the small piece, than to solve it. Besides, I'll get a flavor of what you're doing and how you think, and that'll give me a better idea what you need.

Be clear about the little piece, too. Describe the logic you want carefully. If you can't (and it isn't always easy), give examples with the data you have and the results you want.

Tell me your context: graduate work? your first time with SPSS? Have you come from SAS, or C, or no experience with programming at all?

And tell me what you're working with. Big or little data? 100 cases, 10,000 cases, and a million cases, are all handled differently. Twenty variables are very different from 200 variables.

What units are you studying - people? Doctor’s visits? What key variables identify them?

It's OK to ask a question about a particular need. But the less confident you are about the rest of your project, the more you need to tell me about it. I've solved a lot of problems by just answering the question presented. But if it's serious, if I'm to help with the project and not just the incidental piece, I need these things.

Give me some of your data. No description is ever as good.

King Douglas: Has there been an SPSS problem that you couldn’t solve without help?

Richard Ristow: Yes. Anything with a script, I’ve had to hand off. There’s no question that I’ve gone to Raynald with some macro problems. I don’t do it so often these days, as I’ve learned a lot of techniques.

King Douglas: To whom do you turn when you need help solving a problem that involves SPSS?

Richard Ristow: The [SPSSX e-mail] List. If it’s a data-handling problem, I don’t have much hope because I’m probably one of the better data handlers on the list. If it’s a statistics problem and I can get an answer from Marta, I really try to.