Many people in the world are bi-lingual, some speak French, and others speak German or Cantonese or even Greek. In order to understand another language, a person at first needs to have a firm grasp of their own. Statistics is the mother tongue of psychology. In order to understand and verify the data gathered from empirical research, a strong understanding of statistics is needed.
Starting a psychology degree some students are taken by surprise at the importance of the statistics based modules. But when you take a step back from statistical use in psychological research, many other areas require a functional understanding of stats. For example marketing research, academic and sporting achievements all require the foundations of statistical knowledge. Real world examples of statistical use include; advertising campaigns such as the L’ORÉAL Paris campaign for Ultra-Volume Collagen Mascara. This advert claims that, 76% of women think the product can increase their lash length by 12x their natural state, “in one single glance”. At first sight, this statistic appears quite meaningful. After all, 79% of any population is a large majority. However, on close inspection we can see that only 60 participants took part. My maths isn’t that great but I work that out to be around 47 women, who think this to be true. That is that 47 women out of every 60 we see (who use this product,) are lucky enough to bare eyelashes that resemble a camel’s… Really? Understanding the basics of statistics shows this research to be less valid as the small sample size isn’t representative of a wider population.
Some people including myself are what I like to call maths phobic and, have to sit through the tediousness of a stats lecture at 9am on a Monday morning, following a hectic weekend repeating the mantra “I want to be a psychologist not a statistician!!” But actually those flavourless lectures transport the dull and lucid data, collected from empirical research into a meaningful story. And a psychological degree places great emphasis on being able to collect and interpret data not just for research purposes but also in analysing an individual in a clinical setting. Like every other science, the practitioner has to be fluent in their area of expertise in order to comprehend another. As for the importance of statistics in my opinion it transports psychology from being a philosophical subject to a scientific one.
“Statistics is the most important science in the whole world: for upon it depends the practical application of every other science; the one science essential to all political and social administration, all education, all organisation based upon experience, for it only gives the results of our experience.” –Florence Nightingal
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