7 In Practice: Statistics

Now that we have reviewed the core concepts underlying descriptive and inferential statistics, how do we put this into practice? Dana Wanzer (2022) outlines four practical steps to hypothesis testing:

1. Look at the data: examine the descriptive statistics and describe your hypotheses;
2. Check assumptions: ensure your data are satisfactory for performing the inferential test that you hope to use (or select an alternative statistic);
3. Perform the test: run the inferential statistic; and
4. Interpret the results: make a decision about whether you reject or fail to reject the null hypothesis and write up the results in APA format.

We shall come back to these four steps each time we learn a new statistical test. In the next chapter, we shall get started with some of the basics of using jamovi to organize and look at data.