ABSTRACT
The manipulation of statistical formulas is no substitute for knowing what one is doing.
— Hubert Blalock, Jr., Social Statistics, Chapter 19
The goal of this chapter is to illustrate the process of testing a statistical hypothesis. Unfortunately, just being familiar with a number of statistical terms and a few distributions is not sufficient in order to draw valid conclusions from the data gathered. A clear formulation of the hypotheses to be tested as well as a clear understanding of the basic mathematical phenomena involved are absolutely necessary in order to be able to extract facts from data.
