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The role of statistics in psychology

Ciarán Mc Mahon, B.Sc., Ph.D.

Dublin Business School

September 13th 2010

Probably too big a question to handle here, but we can agree that it involves:

  • the scientific study of human behaviour, including the mind

This fact leads us to two basic problems in psychology, which statistics can help solve:

1. What do we do with all this information/data?

1. What to do with all this information?

average scores

find patterns

highest scores

lowest scores

most common

make sense

Summarise!

All of these types of activities are what is known as

Descriptive statistics

... these 'describe' the results of our experiments,

making it easier to see what is happening in a large amount of data

2. What does all this information/data mean?

2. What does all this information mean?

understand the data

judgments

comparison of results

probability of the results

validity

reliability

significant differences

Conclusions!

Inferential statistics:

.. these allow us to make calculations which will tell us if the results that we got can be applied to more people than those that we studied

This is important, because we need to know how our results fit into the 'bigger picture' of psychological science

Or in other words, if the results from our sample can be generalised to the population at large

However, both descriptive and inferential statistics are common in many other sciences

Why?

Because in psychology we deal with things like:

ideas

concepts

categories

attitudes

symbols

What do all of these things have in common?

1. They are difficult to measure

2. They are difficult to observe

Two things which science relies on...

In fact, psychology is often accused of being unscientific, because mental phenomena are hard to measure, and hard to observe

But...

If a psychologist can produce good statistics, perhaps demonstrated in a graph...

... then it becomes easier to relate our results to the bigger picture

In effect, statistics is what makes psychology scientific

Without statistics, we cannot

test hypotheses

support theories

disconfirm evidence

or evaluate treatment

The study and use of statistics is, in some ways, much more important in psychology than other sciences

What is 'psychology'?

experiments

surveys

interviews

questionnaires

observations

case studies

tests

brain scans

And what will we get from all of these things?

... lots and lots of data!

However, that's not enough...

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