ABSTRACT
When I was in graduate school, one of my statistics professors often repeated what passes, in statistics, for a joke: “If this is all Greek to you, well that’s good.” Unfortunately, most of the class was so lost we didn’t even get the joke. The world of statistics and research in the social sciences, like any specialized field, has its own terminology, language, and conventions. In this chapter, I review some of the fundamental research principles and terminology including the distinction between samples and populations, methods of sampling, types of variables, and the distinction between inferential and descriptive statistics. Finally, I provide a brief word about different types of research designs.
