ABSTRACT
Throughout this book I have been explaining how to perform a range of statistical analyses. So the next piece of advice may seem a little unexpected: don’t use up your valuable time undertaking statistical analysis when you can get a computer to do it for you! There are many excellent statistics programs, such as SPSS (see Hinton et al., 2004), the calculations are done quickly with a degree of consistent accuracy that we can rarely match as human beings. The key point I hope to have made in the book is that it is important to know why and how statistical analysis operates, the reasoning behind it, the assumptions made and the types of data that particular analyses can deal with. This knowledge not only allows you to perform the calculations with a calculator but it is also invaluable when using a computer. If you do not understand what you are doing then using a computer simply compounds the problem. When performing, say, a t test by hand you might learn something about the operation and logic of the test but with a computer the test gets ‘magically’ done and the result appears like a rabbit out of a hat. If you didn’t know what you were doing beforehand, you certainly will not be any the wiser afterwards. It is only when we know what we are doing that the computer comes into its own. The person who understands statistical analysis can appreciate what the computer is doing, and more importantly, know when it is NOT DOING what is really wanted.
