Exploratory Data Analysis and Critiques of Significance Testing

New

This course will show, in a very practical way, the approach called "Exploratory Data Analysis" (EDA) where the aim is to extract useful information from data, with an enquiring, open and sceptical mind. It is, in many ways, an antidote to many advanced modelling approaches, where researchers lose touch with the richness of their data. Seeing interesting patterns in the data is the goal of EDA, rather than testing for statistical significance. The course will also consider the recent critiques of conventional "significance testing" approaches that have lead some journals to ban significance tests. Students who take this course will hopefully get more out of their data, achieve a more balanced overview of data analysis in the social sciences.

This module is designed for MPhil and PhD students as part of the Social Science Research Methods Centre (SSRMC) training programme - a shared platform for providing research students with a broad range of quantitative and qualitative research methods skills that are relevant across the social sciences.

It will be useful for students to have completed the introductory statistics course (FiAS), but this module will have little technical content.

Number of sessions: 1

• To understand that the fetish for statistical significance testing has obscured the goals of analysing data for many social scientists.
• To understand the role of graphics in EDA
• To discuss the other ways in which the significance testing paradigm has perverted scientific research, such as through the replication crisis and fraud.

To understand how to explore data in an open-minded way, remaining sceptical that the most obvious explanations of patterns in datasets are the most useful ones.

Lecture

• Marsh, C. & Elliott, J. Exploring Data: An introduction to Data Analysis for Social Scientists, Polity Press, 2008.
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploratory_data_analysis

All students are expected to give feedback for each module they take...

At the end of each module, students will be sent a link to a very short evaluation form. They will also be able to find this link on the Moodle page for their course. The survey takes a few minutes to fill in, and can even be done on a mobile phone. Students that do not respond to the survey the first time, will receive regular automated reminders until the survey is completed.

Students will not be given certification or proof of attendance for any module for which they have not provided feedback.

4 hours

Once a year