Why you need to use statistics

Much of everyday life depends on making forecasts, and business can’t progress without being able to audit change or plan action. In your research, you may be looking at areas such as purchasing, production, capital investment, long-term development, quality control, human resource development, recruitment and selection, marketing, credit risk assessment or financial forecasts or others.

And that is why the informed use of statistics is of direct importance to you while you are collecting your data and analysing them. If nothing else, your results and findings will be more accurate, more believable and, consequently, more useful.

Some of the reasons why you will be using statistics to analyse your data are the same reasons why you are doing the research. Ignoring the possibility that you are researching because the project or dissertation element of your qualification is compulsory, rather than because you very much want to find something out, you are likely to be researching because you want to:

• measure things;
• examine relationships;
• make predictions;
• test hypotheses;
• construct concepts and develop theories;
• explore issues;
• explain activities or attitudes;
• describe what is happening;
• present information;
• make comparisons to find similarities and differences;
• draw conclusions about populations based only on sample results.

If you didn’t want to do at least one of these things, there would be no point to doing your research at all.