Question

In not more than 6 or 7 concisely focused and crafted sentences, describe how the Statistics (Quantitative) Research Cycle forms a comprehensive and integrated method of analysis that tests “What we really know for sure”.

Answer 1

Statistics (Quantitative) Research Cycle forms a comprehensive and integrated method of analysis that tests "what we really know for sure".

There are several steps that constitute the procedure of statistical analysis including everything. They can be summarized into 6 steps as follows :

1. Study Objective : This includes identifying objective of the study, deciding the study design, promoting research and executing it. This includes designing the study questionnaire according to the objective.
2. Methods for collecting data : An appropriate sample size is chosen to study the entire population pattern. E.g, research(primary, secondary), interviews, group discussions, identifying participants, survey, forms, etc.
3. Data reduction : Data's dimensions are reduced to extract meaningful variables or features that should be studied for the objective and understanding their type i.e, nominal, categorical, ordinal, numerical, etc.
4. Descriptive Statistics : This is used to summarize the basic features of the data through measures of central tendency (e.g, mean, median, mode, variance, skewness, kurtosis, presence of outliers, etc). The data is also visualised for the same using histogram, boxplot, etc.
5. Inferential Statistics : This goes beyond the descriptives of the data. It is used to study the relationship among the variables, compare with population parameters using hypothesis testing by defining level of significance using appropriate test statistics. E.g, correlation coefficient, t-test, null vs alternative hypothesis, etc.
6. Discussing results and drawing conclusions : After all the analysis, conclusions are drawn. Also, limitations are discussed for better solution.