Why Study Statistics PDF

Why do we need to learn statistics?  Defining Statistics “Statistics”: A science that deals with the collection, organization, analysis, and interpretation of numerical data Helps address questions such as What kind of data needs to be collected? How many data are needed to p...

Why do we need to learn statistics?  Defining Statistics “Statistics”: A science that deals with the collection, organization, analysis, and interpretation of numerical data Helps address questions such as What kind of data needs to be collected? How many data are needed to provide sufficient guidance? How should we organize the data? How can we analyze the data and draw conclusions? How can we assess the strength of the conclusions? What do you think? Think about it... A representative comes to your office with a brand-new drug that they claim, “reduces depression by 70%”. Do you invest in this new medication? Do you prescribe it to your patients? Population “Population”: the entire collection vs Sample of everyone or everything that researchers are interested in measuring or studying. N “Sample”: A subset of the population, from which measures are actually obtained. n Descriptive vs Inferential Statistics “Descriptive Statistics”: Statistical procedures used to describe, summarize, organize, and simplify relevant characteristics of data. Does not go beyond the data Ex: Mean, standard deviation, and variance “Inferential Statistics”: Statistical procedures that use sample statistics to generalize to our make inferences about a population. A little more complicated Ex: T test, ANOVA, correlation How do we analyze inferential statistics? There are a variety of different statistical software(s) that you can use to analyze data. Excel Widely available Limited statistical tools available SAS Expensive Need to be able to code SPSS Expensive Easy to learn R Free Open source Need to be able to code Harder to learn Other options: JASP, MATLAB Any questions?