The Teaching of Personal Interaction in Statistical Consulting

Consulting training has been discussed by panels at statistical meetings, e.g., the spring meeting (ASA, Biometric Society, and IM1S) at Blacksburg, Virginia in 1968 and papers have been appearing on the subject. The recent paper by Watts [12] describing the statistical consulting training program at the University of Wisconsin will hopefully stimulate discussion of other existing approaches. Candid reports, such as that by Daniel [7] which was very helpful to this author, are in shorter supply than impersonal descriptions of ideal consultant behavior. In 1964 the Department of Biometry at the University of M1innesota began to offer a course in statistical consulting to its own graduate students. In the years previous to 1964 the students were officed so close to the faculty that it was easy to get student help in consulting. As the Department added three faculty members from 1964 through 1966, and the graduate students lost office space to the new faculty, the student offices were moved to another building a block away. As the new faculty became available for consulting, the old method of involving the students became less "necessary" as well as less convenient, and it was felt that student consulting education was beginning to suffer. To meet the need anticipated in 1964, it was decided to offer and require one quarter (three credits) of consulting education in the form of a seminar-like course, to be offered all quarters of the academic year as well as both summer sessions. The debate about the structure of the course involved two issues: (a) should it be for beginning, intermediate, or advanced students? (b) should the problems be essentially a random sample of the faculty's consulting practice, or should "good" problems be selected? For (a) it was decided to aim the course toward students beginning their second graduate year in Biometry; for (b) we chose the "random problem" approach, subject to the practical limitations of the schedule and willingness of the client. During the years of "easy" medical research grant money about two new problems per week came into the Biometry Consulting Laboratory as potential for the course (we now get less than one per week). The students are generally quite surprised at the portion of the course content relating to personal interaction between consultant and client. (The sessions on robustness and statistical techniques particularly useful to medical research are neither as surprising to the students nor new enough to the readers of this journal to warrant mentioning here.) Students enter the course with preconceived views on consulting relationships. Some begin (and end) with the attitude that personal interaction gets in the way of science, that personal feelings are a nuisance to science and should be dealt with by being ignored as much as possible. These students feel that there is only one satisfactory way for a statistician and scientist to interact: the adult-to-adult reasoning manner of reserved, mature, gentlemen-scholars; they have clear images of unhurried, highly competent collaborators. These students seem to plan to avoid consulting relationships that are very far from this model, particularly if they feel professionally inadequate. As the class views the "clinic" of live clients, however, and they are asked by the instructor to tactfully ascertain the relationship the client is seeking, they see there is not only a broad spectrum of statistical difficulty and expense, but a wide range of client attitudes about the relationship. Some clients, of course, are very ignorant about what a statistician is and does. This is particularly true of the young resident physician who is being assigned his first research duty. For such clients the statistician is the one to offer a relationship as well as attempt to describe his (the statistician's) area of competence. Others (e.g., Sprent [11]) have described the client who worships statistics and expects our field to perform objective miracles; this type of client obviously needs some role clarification, but the student is surprised at how difficult it can be to give such a client a realistic view of our field's capabilities. The most frustrating relationship requests the students see are those that come from clients who insist on a child-to-parent or parent-to-child relationship. Berne [3] has described these kinds of relationships in general and Bellville [2] discussed them in the doctor-patient context. The client who insists on a parent-to-child relationship is one who makes it clear that he is the boss and will decide what will be done and when. Some physicians seem to demand this kind of relationship with every non-physician they contact. This can be very hard on some types of statisticians. Through class discussion the student is encouraged to look at himself and consider whether this kind of situation makes him so angry he would be rendered ineffective as a statistician by being taunted into a