ABSTRACT

It has been almost nine decades since the p-value was devised, and it will certainly be at least a century before someone can find a replacement for it. It is essential for any researcher to have basic knowledge about statistical analyses and p-values to both interpret and write scientific papers, but especially when using open data. The better your knowledge of statistical analysis, the more innovative you will be in generating ideas from open data. In this chapter, we are going to provide you with basic essential knowledge about statistical analysis, including choosing the appropriate test to calculate p-value, so that you may interpret almost any research paper you read. We will also provide more in-depth information about how to perform statistical analyses on your own data. For the sake of easing the process of choosing statistical tests, we developed an interactive flow diagram, which you can easily study to choose the most suitable statistical test for your data. At the end of the chapter is a tutorial for analyzing the open data that we accessed in Chapter 1 and wrote the protocol for in Chapter 2.