Welcome

Thank you for visiting the GoFactr Blog. The goal of this blog is to provide education, references, and resources into the statistical techniques used within the social sciences. Whether you’re starting your education or just need a refresher, the hope is you can use this blog as a reference and then use GoFactr.com to perform the analysis. Blog entries will be tagged by category and the idea is to have tutorials, contextual examples, and cover relevant topics as they arise. Thank you again for visiting and please feel free to contact us or leave a comment below.

Statistics and Psychology

Why do I have to know statistics? I hear this complaint a lot from undergraduate psychology students. Research methods classes are often the most difficult classes for students pursuing a career in psychology, sociology or other social sciences and act as de facto gate keepers for these disciplines. Indeed, some students chose these fields with the specific intent of avoiding any mathematics at all. So why is it necessary to know statistics within these fields?

The short answer is scientists need an unbiased, impartial way to agree upon research outcomes. Unlike experiments in the physical sciences (physics, engineering, etc …) where outcomes are often predicted by mathematics, social science experiments tend to rely on testing groups of people and then comparing how different the average person in each group is. Statistics and statistical analysis is the agreed upon tool to decide when different is really different and not just the result of chance or wishful thinking.

Maintain a positive attitude

Remember to maintain a postive relationship with statistics as you learn about it. Just because you don’t understand something today, doesn’t mean you will never understand it. The strange notation and cryptic language used in statistics can appear daunting when you first encounter them, but with practice and patience in no time you will easily understand what is meant by p(B | A) or F(3, 26) = 3.32, p = .023.

This isn’t just wishful thinking either, evidence for this can be found in a recent study by Chen et al. They looked at positive attitudes toward math with overall achievement in the subject. After accounting for individual ability (IQ) and other factors, maintaining a postive attitude predicted success. Read this again:

Based on our data, the unique contribution of positive attitude to math achievement is as large as the contribution from IQ.

Your attitude toward learning math is just as important as your ability. This is a perfect example of how knowing and using statistics can lead to discoveries which benefit individual lives.

And More …

While posts will mainly focus on statistics and its use within psychology and the social sciences, off-topic posts will appear as time/interest allows. The goal is for posts to be around 5 minutes or less in read length and easily comprehendable. Stay tuned for more to come and thank you again for visiting.

GoFactr

Check out GoFactr.com for all your research statistical needs. The online statistics program that computes descriptive statistics, ANOVAs, T-Tests, Linear and Logistic regression and Factor Analysis. No software to download means it runs conveniently from your tablet, chromebook, smartphone, laptop or desktop.

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