RESEARCH TIPS
Statistical evidence: Part 1
Does your work in progress require facts, data, and number-crunching? Research expert Tarja Moles helps you get to grips with working with statistics.
S
tatistics – does the mere mention of the word make you feel bored or uncomfortable? Although statistics may not always be easy to understand and they can be used to mislead people, don’t be tempted to discount their usefulness. If you’re a non-fiction writer, you can use them to convey information, demonstrate how important the matter in hand is, provide evidence for your argument and possibly even convince your readers to adopt your point of view. Our modern society values numbers, which is why including statistics in your writing can be powerful.
Statistics and data
Often the terms ‘statistics’ and ‘data’ are used synonymously. However, they are not, strictly speaking, the same: data are raw information; statistics summarise and interpret these raw data. This is to say, data are the direct result of research (eg information acquired during a survey) while statistics emerge from analysing those data. Statistics can take the form of, for instance, reported frequencies and percentages in a text, or be visually presented in tables and graphs.
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