e. variables) there must a concerted effort to measure the phenomenon with as much precision and accuracy as possible (Mendenhall & Ramey, 1973). This is, of course, accomplished through the use of statistics. Situations wherein statistical processes are not required are generally reserved for qualitative types of research such as historical, philosophical, and/or cultural trend studies.
One of man's greatest fears is that of the power of numbers. For most people numbers are nothing more than a hodgepodge of digits that are bewildering and often meaningless. As a result individuals often prefer to judge events, occurrences, phenomena, and situations from a traditionalist point-of-view wherein reason, conclusion, and inference are made on the basis of past acceptance rather than on a best practices policy. Justification for historical acceptance is usually based upon a fear of numbers and a lack of willingness to extract meaningful information from them. For those accepting of alternatives, statistical tools have been devised wherein it is possible to extract meaningful information from data and interpret whatever the data holds as its' secret (Freund, 1967). However, as test data often comes to the researcher investigator in unintelligible form, as test numbers by themselves are, the researcher must be knowledgeable enough to be able to choose the most reliable and efficient best-fit practice statistical procedure. If the appropriate procedure is not chosen the researcher will then wander through a labyrinth of unimportant data and embark upon an odyssey of failure (Ohlson 1998).
Before one enters the world of statistics one must put away all their fears and illusions about statistics. The stimuli that incite mathematical panic are largely illusory. Many of the formulas used by scientists in their statistical computations present an awesome, if not terrifying, appearance, but beneath the strange symbols lurks nothing more foreboding than the simple arithmetic we all mastered in school. The uses one will make of best practice statistics require no differential equations, no calculus, and no analytic geometry. The sometimes-horrifying mathematical manipulations that fill one with ghastly anxiety as they approach a lesson in statistics ultimately reveal themselves...
Statistics and Juries In the video "How Statistics Fool Juries," Oxford mathematician Peter Donnelly attempts to demonstrate through a number of examples how statistics, when viewed in a common manner, can be misunderstood and how this can have legal repercussions. Through a number of thought experiments, Donnelly provides the audience with examples of how seemingly simple statistics can be misinterpreted and how many more variables must be taken into account when
One of the most common fallacies is to confuse correlation with causation, but the two are actually distinct. My demonstrating that construction of snowmen and outbreak of acne occur simultaneously does not mean that snowmen produce acne. It may imply an underlying matter, such as the snow itself may contain some component that may instigate the outbreak, or the children who build the snowmen may be particularly vulnerable to
This type of measurement is best used when the data has also been captured at the ordinal or ratio level as the orthogonality of the data set is reliable (Marshall, Ruiz, Bredillet, 2008). Extrapolating statistics to a broader population is also dependent on the approach of randomization used. When a solid methodology, sampling frame and approach to randomization have all been defined, inferential data is often used in organizations
As explained earlier, statisticians in the academe and in specialist industries apply principles and techniques of statistics in different ways. Statisticians in the academe apply their knowledge of statistics in more scientific approaches: multivariate analyses, for example, are reported in a scientific manner, usually communicated in a scholarly approach through journal articles and published or unpublished research reports. Industry specialists, meanwhile, implement statistical principles and techniques more creatively, for their
Statistics are the tools to describe the systematic body of information that assist policy makers or managers to make decision about important issues. Statistics provide the accurate methodology to draw the accurate inference from the sample of data to the full population. Despite the benefits derived from applied statistics, there are challenges that policy makers face in measuring social issues. Answer to Question A In public sector, statistical approach is used to
In a follow-up experimentalinvestigation among female college students, Onwuegbuzie (1995) reported asignificant interaction between statistics test anxiety and type of examination (i.e. Specifically, three types of factors are identified: (a) situational factors, such as math experience (Betz, 1978; Roberts & Bilderback, 1980; Tomazic & Katz, 1988; Zeidner, 1991; Wilson, 1997; Balo_lu, 2001; Hong & Karstensson, 2002; Balo_lu, 2003), statistics experience (Sutarso, 1992), computer experience (Zimmer & Fuller, 1996), and research
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