Dr. Fisher's Casebook

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SignificanceVolume 8, Issue 4 p. 169-169 FeaturesFree Access Dr. Fisher's casebook What are little statisticians made of? First published: 25 November 2011 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1740-9713.2011.00522.xAboutSectionsPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat I was intrigued by an interchange which took place a while ago on the anzstat email list. Adrian Baddeley delivered a long and clearly deeply thought and felt piece about training statisticians. He thought that taking only mathematics students as the raw material and training them in mathematical statistics, the usual approach in Australia, led to poor ability to engage with colleagues from other disciplines, poor ability to extract information from data, and a dearth of trained statisticians. One of the responses was from Sharon Snowdon, who had been taught statistics as part of a psychology degree, after a first degree in maths and statistics. She was taught by people who did not understand the subject, presumably psychologists, and she found it a very difficult experience. I understand her frustration. A relative recently did a degree in psychology, where she was taught statistics by a psychologist. She did not think that this teacher made the subject in any way comprehensible and was teaching a series of recipes using SPSS, while demanding that students read her own book on the subject. There are many such books. Why does a psychologist think they can write a book on statistics? I think that they know enough about psychology to know they that do not know enough to write a book about psychology. One example will show the sort of thing I mean: “What this p value actually tells us is how probable it is that our results could be explained by random errors. This concept is fundamental to statistics and you should make sure you understand it fully.”1 That is from a book for nurses written by a psychologist. What the p value actually tells us, of course, is how probable it is that our results could have arisen if the null hypothesis which we are testing is true, which is not the same thing at all. I have to agree with Sharon Snowdon. I think that statistics is best taught by statisticians. But who is a statistician? Does this really mean that we must all start with a degree in mathematics? I have known several statisticians who started their higher education with psychology. They became interested in statistics while studying psychology and decided that this was the direction for them. They spent their time doing statistics, writing about statistics, and teaching statistics. They became statisticians. I have also known people go in the opposite direction, statisticians who became more interested in the substantive question they were trying to answer than in the methods they were using to answer it. From then on, they did statistical analyses only for themselves. They ceased to describe themselves as statisticians but became epidemiologists or health services researchers instead. In the same way, a member of a different discipline becomes a statistician when they become more interested in the means than in the ends. Malcolm Gladwell has suggested that to become really good at something, you need to work at it for 10 000 hours2. I read the book some time ago and I don't now recall how reliable his evidence is for this, but 10 000 hours works out to be about 6 working years. I think anybody who spent all their working time for 6 years doing statistics, talking about statistics, reading about statistics, and going to meetings of the RSS or ASA would be entitled to call themselves a statistician at the end of it. I suspect that the psychologists who are teaching statistics to students of psychology have not immersed themselves in this way. It took me more like 20 years before I thought I really knew what I was doing (which does not mean I actually did), but I may just be a slow study. So let us have many routes into statistics. It is a fascinating way to spend your time and it can do a great deal of good. References 1Hicks, C.M. (1990) Research and Statistics: A Practical Introduction for Nurses. London: Prentice Hall. Google Scholar 2Gladwell, M. (2008) Outliers: The Story of Success. London: Allen Lane. Google Scholar Volume8, Issue4December 2011Pages 169-169 ReferencesRelatedInformation