Statistics for People Who (Think They) Hate Statistics

by Neil J. Salkind

Statistics—the science of organizing and analyzing information to make the information more easily understood—made these tasks doable.

take any old data they have and think that by running them through some sophisticated SPSS or Excel analysis, they will have reliable, trustworthy, and meaningful outcomes—not true.

if you don’t start with reliable and trustworthy data, what you’ll have after your data are analyzed are unreliable and untrustworthy results.

Statistics is a tool that helps us understand the world around us. It does so by organizing information we’ve collected and then letting us make certain statements about how characteristics of those data are applicable to new settings. Descriptive and inferential statistics work hand in hand, and which one you use and when depends on the question you want answered.

the National Academy of Sciences (first chartered in 1863 by the way!) “shall, whenever called upon by any department of the Government, investigate, examine, experiment, and report upon any subject of science or art.” This charter, in turn, led to the formation of the National Research Council some 50 years later in 1916, another federal agency that assisted in providing information that policy makers need to make informed decisions.

in almost any endeavor, numbers count.

This section of Statistics for People Who (Think They) Hate Statistics is devoted to understanding how we can use statistics to describe an outcome and better understand it, once the information about the outcome is organized.

measures of central tendency

how computing one of several different types of averages gives you the one best data point that represents a set of scores.

coverage of tools we need to fully describe a set of data points in its discussion of variability, including the ...

the mean is very sensitive to extreme scores.