Role of Statistics in Multidisciplinary Research – With Reference to Psychological Research.

ABSTRACT

Statistics is the study of the collection, organization, analysis, interpretation and presentation of data. It deals with all aspects of data. It is usually noticed that some routine words are given technical meanings in statistical parlance (e.g. “mean,” “normal,” “significance,” “effect,” and “power”). It is essential to resist the temptation of conflating their technical meanings. A failure to do so may have a lot to do with the ready acceptance of the “effect size” and “power” arguments in recent years. As, statistics is used (i) to describe data in terms of the shape, central tendency, and dispersion of their simple frequency distribution, and (ii) to make decisions about the properties of the statistical populations on the basis of sample statistics. Statistical decisions are made with reference to a body of theoretical distributions the distributions of various test statistics that are in turn derived from the appropriate sample statistics. In every case, the calculated test statistic is compared to the theoretical distribution, which is made up of an infinite number of tokens of the test statistic in question. Hence, the “in the long run” caution should be made explicit in every probabilistic statement based on inferential statistics (e.g. “the result is significant at the 0.05 level in the long run”).Despite the recent movement to discourage psychologists from conducting significance tests, significance tests can be defended by (i) clarifying some concepts, (ii) examining the role of statistics in empirical research, and (iii) showing that the sampling distribution of the test statistic is both the bridge between descriptive and inferential statistics and the probability foundation of significance tests. The present paper discusses the critical issues of statistics in psychological research.