Section author: Danielle J. Navarro and David R. Foxcroft
Statistics in everyday life¶
“We are drowning in information,* but we are starved for knowledge”*—Various authors, original probably John Naisbitt
When I started writing up my lecture notes I took the 20 most recent news articles posted to the ABC news website. Of those 20 articles, it turned out that 8 of them involved a discussion of something that I would call a statistical topic and 6 of those made a mistake. The most common error, if you’re curious, was failing to report baseline data (e.g., the article mentions that 5% of people in situation X have some characteristic Y, but doesn’t say how common the characteristic is for everyone else!). The point I’m trying to make here isn’t that journalists are bad at statistics (though they almost always are), it’s that a basic knowledge of statistics is very helpful for trying to figure out when someone else is either making a mistake or even lying to you. In fact, one of the biggest things that a knowledge of statistics does to you is cause you to get angry at the newspaper or the internet on a far more frequent basis. You can find a good example of this in the section A real life example.
There’s more to research methods than statistics¶
So far, most of what I’ve talked about is statistics, and so you’d be forgiven for thinking that statistics is all I care about in life. To be fair, you wouldn’t be far wrong, but research methodology is a broader concept than statistics. So most research methods courses will cover a lot of topics that relate much more to the pragmatics of research design, and in particular the issues that you encounter when trying to do research with humans. However, about 99% of student fears relate to the statistics part of the course, so I’ve focused on the stats in this discussion, and hopefully I’ve convinced you that statistics matters, and more importantly, that it’s not to be feared. That being said, it’s pretty typical for introductory research methods classes to be very stats-heavy. This is not (usually) because the lecturers are evil people. Quite the contrary, in fact. Introductory classes focus a lot on the statistics because you almost always find yourself needing statistics before you need the other research methods training. Why? Because almost all of your assignments in other classes will rely on statistical training, to a much greater extent than they rely on other methodological tools. It’s not common for undergraduate assignments to require you to design your own study from the ground up (in which case you would need to know a lot about research design), but it is common for assignments to ask you to analyse and interpret data that were collected in a study that someone else designed (in which case you need statistics). In that sense, from the perspective of allowing you to do well in all your other classes, the statistics is more urgent.
But note that “urgent” is different from “important” – they both matter. I really do want to stress that research design is just as important as data analysis, and this book does spend a fair amount of time on it. However, while statistics has a kind of universality, and provides a set of core tools that are useful for most types of psychological research, the research methods side isn’t quite so universal. There are some general principles that everyone should think about, but a lot of research design is very idiosyncratic, and is specific to the area of research that you want to engage in. To the extent that it’s the details that matter, those details don’t usually show up in an introductory stats and research methods class.