ABSTRACT
Statistics is a way of organizing, describing, and making inferences from data, and statistical methods are used throughout the physical, natural, and social sciences, including the field of communication. Several communication programs, such as mine at The Ohio State University, are appropriately located in the same administrative colleges as other disciplines that use statistical methods reside, such as psychology, sociology, and political science. Professional statisticians disagree on such seemingly uncontroversial matters such as how to best quantify “average” and “variability,” and yet the people use the concepts routinely in communication science. To understand how to use statistics in science, the readers need to grasp the concepts as well as the vocabulary used to discuss those concepts. Computers are used to do much of the computational work, so one’s initial exposure to statistics is best focused on understanding how statistical procedures are used and getting a handle on the vocabulary.
