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Chapter 1
Why you need to use statistics in your research
This chapter explains the importance of statistics, and why you need to use statistics to analyse your data.
What is statistics?
Put simply, statistics is a range of procedures for gathering, organising, analysing and presenting quantitative data. ‘Data’ is the term for facts that have been obtained and subsequently recorded, and, for statisticians, ‘data’ usually refers to quantitative data that are numbers. Essentially therefore, statistics is a scientific approach to analysing numerical data in order to enable us to maximise our interpretation, understanding and use. This means that statistics helps us turn data into information; that is, data that have been interpreted, understood and are useful to the recipient. Put formally, for your project, statistics is the systematic collection and analysis of numerical data, in order to investigate or discover relationships among phenomena so as to explain, predict and control their occurrence. The possibility of confusion comes from the fact that not only is statistics the techniques used on quantitative data, but the same word is also used to refer to the numerical results from statistical analysis.
In very broad terms, statistics can be divided into two branches – descriptive and inferential statistics.
1. Descriptive statistics is concerned with quantitative data and the methods for describing them. (‘Data’ (facts) is the plural of
‘datum’ (a fact), and therefore always needs a plural verb.) This
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/production/mcgraw−hill/booksxml/brownsaunders/ch1
Chapter 1
Why you need to use statistics in your research
This chapter explains the importance of statistics, and why you need to use statistics to analyse your data.
What is statistics?
Put simply, statistics is a range of procedures for gathering, organising, analysing and presenting quantitative data. ‘Data’ is the term for facts that have been obtained and subsequently recorded, and, for statisticians, ‘data’ usually refers to quantitative data that are numbers. Essentially therefore, statistics is a scientific approach to analysing numerical data in order to enable us to maximise our interpretation, understanding and use. This means that statistics helps us turn data into information; that is, data that have been interpreted, understood and are useful to the recipient. Put formally, for your project, statistics is the systematic collection and analysis of numerical data, in order to investigate or discover relationships among phenomena so as to explain, predict and control their occurrence. The possibility of confusion comes from the fact that not only is statistics the techniques used on quantitative data, but the same word is also used to refer to the numerical results from statistical analysis.
In very broad terms, statistics can be divided into two branches – descriptive and inferential statistics.
1. Descriptive statistics is concerned with quantitative data and the methods for describing them. (‘Data’ (facts) is the plural of
‘datum’ (a fact), and therefore always needs a plural verb.) This
Kerrypress Ltd – Typeset in XML
A
Division: ch1
F
Sequential 1
www.kerrypress.co.uk - 01582 451331 - www.xpp-web-services.co.uk
JOBNAME: McGraw−TaylorHarris PAGE: 2 SESS: 20 OUTPUT: Thu Oct 4 13:50:42 2007 SUM: 487C4FE7
/production/mcgraw−hill/booksxml/brownsaunders/ch1
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