Reading and learning about statistical significance pointed out things that many of us would say "well duh, that makes sense" (perhaps hindsight bias?), but things that many of us overlook every day.
Often times I hear about research results and statistics and think that they have to be correct, but after reading this chapter I know that's not necessarily so. It's very easy to make things look like they are something when they are in fact not.
Things like standard deviation help us accurately present and understand results. Sometimes when you have data with many numbers and you have a few high numbers, the overall average is affected. However, with standard deviation we can see how the scores vary around the mean (average). This will help us more accurately read the results.
Another measurement that helps us is statistical significance. Often times in our experiments, despite controlling confounding variables and getting results that make it appear to be that one thing caused another, things can be due to chance. Statistical significance helps gives us a picture of how likely it is that the results occurred by chance. If it is less than 5%, the results are considered to have statistical significance.
I think these things are important for all of us to keep in mind while we surf the internet. There are often articles and websites that show statistics that don't accurately portray reality. We must be very careful and hesitant to believe everything that we read.
Jamie,
ReplyDeleteI agree with what you included in your blog post. Statistical principles are a useful tool to help us see and interpret what the naked eye might miss. Statistics can certainly be misleading, like the following: "two out of three dentists recommend this toothpaste." However, little do we know, the advertisers may have asked only three dentists and two of them responded favorably to the toothpaste. Using measures of central tendency and variation would immediately help us realize the deception involved. These principles help us discern what is true and what it false, and can assist us in discovering if an event occurred by chance. This also extends to further than statistics. Just because something is on the world wide web, does not mean it is realistic or true. We have to be wary of what we read.
I totally agree with you. Whenever there's an article in a newspaper or magazine (online, of course. Does print even exist still? Kidding.) we are so easy to take the statistics it has as absolute fact and then when we're arguing and debating with somebody we spit out those statistics. "You're WRONG! See. Look at this research. Look at this graph! Look- I'm right!" It's really awkward when in another second the person you're arguing with has a different statistic about almost the exact same thing but with different results. When things are being conducted sloppily with the sole purpose of proving a point, things can be skewed and incorrect. We need to be more careful of what we believe!
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