Abstract
Students, as well as professional research proposals have been rejected by the proposal committee and some grants awarding bodies for lack of statistical representation. Statistics is the science that is dealing with the collection and organisation, analysis and interpretation of numerical data from which conclusions about the variables under study, are made. This contribution to the pathway to ensuring students’ success argues that it would be misleading and inappropriate to suggest that only studies, which are backed-up with statistical tools, are rigorous and meaningful. Previous research has argued that statistical techniques play crucial role for uncovering hidden knowledge. However, in the present paper, the researchers argue that to assign such potency to statistical tools appear misleading especially to students and newer researchers. The paper notes that of about twenty-three statistical tools available for use by researchers, none possesses any investigative quality. What statistics possesses is an analytic strength, whereby numerical and calculative meanings are assigned to assembled data that cannot uncover beyond the strength of the data-collecting instrument. In this paper, the researchers examine the meaning of statistics, the use of language as a tool of statistics, statistical data and its types; scale of measurement and appropriate statistics, and some of the pitfalls in the use of statistical tools in analysing data from social and behavioural studies. The implication of this for students’ research and success are equally highlighted. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2014.v5n20p1448
Highlights
The lethal predisposition of mankind to leave-off thinking about a thing when it is no longer doubtful is the source of half their errors
Resulting from this culture of legitimation is the indiscriminate use of statistical tools – a finding noted by the Nigerian Educational Research Development Council (NERDC) study when it found that the “wrong use of the F-ratio and Chi-square statistics was common and these two statistics were interchangeably used thereby suggesting the investigator’s lack of understanding of the basic assumptions underlying their correct usage” (Onugha et al, 1995, p. 3)
Statistical tools and methods of analyses, insofar as they deal with numbers that are sometimes represented in abstract terms, are not capable of dealing with those aspects of human conduct, which call for creativity and innovation
Summary
The lethal predisposition of mankind to leave-off thinking about a thing when it is no longer doubtful is the source of half their errors. Attempts to reduce them to such categories involve loss of their most distinctive features’’. Abstract categories involve the “...conceptualization of human behavioural characteristics in terms of variables, which attempt to draw inferences from sample to population that are represented in the form of mathematical and statistical inferences using figures” The most commonly used tools in this exercise are the descriptive and inferential statistics. It would appear that such attempts to abstract human constructions, squeezes out the meanings that are immanent in these behavioural characteristics.
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