Naps, fuzzy socks, and statistics!
Oh sorry, I thought we were naming underrated things.
Anyone who knows me knows that I’m a math nerd — I do calculus when I’m stressed, my favourite “fun fact” is about Simpson’s Paradox, and every math prof I have interacted with knows me by name because of how often I visit their office to yap about math. I even almost changed my major to maths and chemistry in my first year of uni!
Math is everywhere, from the waves of light and sound to the structure of our cells. But we typically don’t appreciate it. Think about it; when you decide to cut across a field instead of going around it to save time, do you think about how you learnt that from Pythagoras Theorem? I didn’t think so.
The number #1 place I’ve noticed that math is extremely undervalued is in research.
Let’s say you’re doing research to see how many men think the sky is blue. Once you’ve found that 99% of men that you interviewed think the sky is blue, what will you do with that information? Well you need to use stats!
Stats ensures that the data you have obtained is not due to chance and checks if there’s even a connection between the variables you examined. If you repeat that experiment, whats the likelihood of you getting the exact same results? What if you did the test with women? Would that change the results?
Not making much sense? Lemme put it this way: without stats, data collection in research would be almost meaningless. You would have no way to see if your data was actually significant. Without stats, our research regarding things like vaccine safety, COVID-19 protocols, standardised tests, they would all be useless as you’d have no way to check if your results were due to chance or due to some actual phenomenon.
Even though stats is a core part of research, its typically not included in conversations regarding research methodology and some at-home researchers do not even consider it when beginning research.
Stats is arguably the most important part of research and I’m here to highlight its importance.
In case you don’t know me, hi! I’m Anika, the lead researcher and co-founder of UltraRice. I’m also a university student and a math and stats lover.
Welcome to The Math Behind Research! A monthly newsletter where we’ll go into different stats concepts and how they are used in research. We’ll also go through different papers to see how they conducted their stats and why they did what they did.
Is there a specific stats concept or paper you’d like me to discuss? Send me an email @ anikagandhi13@gmail.com with the subject line “The Math Behind Research” and I’ll do my very best to get to it!
We’ll start off with the basics and get a deeper understanding of what some core stats concepts are next time! See you then!