Statistics and quantitative research
Is the science and practice of developing human knowledge through the use of empirical data expressed in quantitative form
The collecting, summarizing, and analyzing of data.
The term also refers to raw numbers, or “stats”, and to the summarization of data
Research methods
Research is structural. There are basic steps depending on the subject matter and researcher.
It is also possible to conduct research using pre-collected data, this is called secondary data analysis.
Steps
Create research proposal
Apply for funding
Design research methodology/study
Apply for ethics approval
Re-define research question / hypothesis
Collect and analyze data
Conduct thorough literature review
Draw conclusions and relate findings
Develop a research question
Variables
Different kinds of methods
Descriptive
Inferential
According to their level
Ordinal
Interval
Nominal
Ratio
In research, the characteristic or phenomenon that can be measured or classified is called a variable
Intervening
Confounding
Dependent
Independent
Variable that you believe will influence your outcome measure
Variable that is dependent on or influenced by the independent variable(s)
Variable that links the independent and dependent variable
variable that has many other variables, or dimensions built into it
Statistics
The sum of all the scores divided by the number of scores.
Mean, Media & Mode
A median is the middle of a distribution
The mode is the most frequently occurring score in a distribution
The mean can be misleading because it can be greatly influenced by extreme scores
Tests
• Parametric tests assume that the variable in question is from a normal distribution
• Non-parametric tests do not require the assumption of normality
Types of analysis
Bivariate analysis is a kind of data analysis that explores the
association between two variables
Multivariate analysis is the analysis of more than two variables
Univariate analysis is the analysis of one variable.