“Statistic: One number that summarizes a property or characteristic of a set of numbers” – Jamie Hale
I know for a lot of people, myself included, statistics can be a bit intimidating. When it comes to reading research, a lot of people tend to ignore the statistical portion of the paper, as in not think critically about it, and instead rely entirely on the statistical experts.
While yes, statistics are hard, it doesn’t have to be in order to think critically about it. That is, you don’t have to know all of the nuances and every specific concept in statistics in order to ask meaningful questions about the statistical analysis portion of a paper.
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“The most important step in the process of every science is the measurement of quantities. … The whole system of civilized life may be fitly symbolized by a foot rule, a set of weights, and a clock. – James Maxwell
Statistical techniques may be applied to any subject that produces data. The aim of this section of the site is to introduce the reader to some basic statistical concepts. It is not intended to be a complete comprehensive summary of statistics but a resource to help you make sense of and interpret the statistics most commonly used in research papers.
The fundamental basics of statistics are pretty straight forward. All statistics really does is summarize and present data collected in a way that accurately reflects its meaning.
Again, the goal here isn’t to turn into a statistical expert, but instead to gain an understanding of some basic fundamental concepts and skills needed to in order to read a results section of a paper and question the statistical test used in the paper and ask if that was the best test to use. Other question you might ask are, why did the author choose to run that statistical test? Has correlation been distinguished from regression? Has the confidence intervals been calculated and reported? And so forth.
