The Misuses of Statistics in Research Papers You Should Avoid

Misusing statistics deliberately is unacceptable and inexcusable and if discovered by your supervisor, the retribution can be quite severe. Since you are inexperienced, you might make errors in presenting your statistics in your research paper such as using inappropriate tests, bias, making inappropriate inferences, and the like. Here are some of the misuses of statistics you should avoid in your research paper.

Bias

Bias refers to prejudice in ordinary terms. It could be that the data you have collected has some biases in it. In other words, maybe those who responded to you were prejudiced in their responses. In statistical terms, it is considered an “error” and if you do not rectify it, it might result in problems such as your being barred by the university for using inappropriate data collection methods or your facing some other penalty such as getting lower marks for not rectifying this systematic error. You should, therefore, use the different statistical methods to rectify this error.

Improper inferences

Most of the statistical reasoning includes drawing inferences about populations from the data collected by you. You may draw an inference by using inductive reasoning or reasoning that goes from particular to general. If you want to avoid any errors, you may need to define the population from whom you are going to collect the data carefully and use an appropriate probability sampling method or technique, failing which the error can result in an improper conclusion. It can also tempting to relate two factors to one another in research or to show that one of these factors caused changes in the other. However, you need to be careful not to conclude causation of a certain event from the correlations. This can also result in a systematic error and you can end up suffering at the end of the day.

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