Reasoning in Psychology Using Statistics

Psychology 138

What is statistics?

Numbers don't generally speak for themselves. Statistics is concerned with techniques that make the numbers "talk", that extract information from and draw conclusions about numbers.

One way to learn about the field of statistics is to listen to practioners explain how it is used. An early practioner of statistics was Florence Nightingale.

According to David S. Moore, The Basic Practice of Statistics, p. 8, "Florence Nightingale (1820-1910) won fame as a founder of the nursing profession and as a reformer of health care. As chief nurse for the British army during the Crimean War, from 1854 to 1856, she found that lack of sanitation and disease killed large numbers of soldiers hospitalized by wounds. Her reforms reduced the death rate at her military hospital from 42.7% to 2.2%.

One of the chief weapons Florence Nightingale used in her efforts was data. She was a pioneer in using graphs to present data in a vivid form that even generals and members of Parliament could understand. Her inventive graphs are a landmark in the growth of the new science of statistics. She considered statistics essential to understanding any social issue and tried to introduce the study of statistics into higher education.

Course Contracts for the different instructors:

About Illinois State University
ISU computer labs
About the ISU Psychology department
The Psychology Quantitative Group

Other Statistics courses in Psychology

We will follow Florence Nightingale's lead. The first two units -- Producing Data and Describing Data -- "stress the analysis of data as a path to understanding. Like her, we will start with graphs to see what data can teach us."

The last unit -- Conclusions From Data -- stress statistical inference, i.e., drawing valid conclusions from data. "Statistical inference not only draws conclusions, but accompanies those conclusion with a statement about how trustworthy they are."