Abstract

DATA REPRESENTATION AND STATISTICAL ANALYSES

Muhammad Sani Abdurrahman, Ph.D

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The motive behind preparing this piece of article was in attempt to the call from young researchers on how to appropriately choose and use a statistical method in data analyses. Statistics is concerned with scientific methods for collecting, organising, summarising, presenting and analysing data as well as drawing valid conclusions and making reasonable decisions on the basis of such analysis. The choice of appropriate statistic to apply for analyzing any research data depends on the nature of data which itself depends on the type and design of the study. Researcher is required to give a step-by-step account of the procedure to be used or already used for data collection and also to report how the data collection procedure conforms to best ethical standards. Most researches will lead to the gathering of data by means of some standardized test or self-constructed research tools. Data analysis gives an indication of what a researcher will do after collecting the data or information. It is expected that when data is collected for a research study, it would be subjected to statistical analysis, the results of which lead to appropriate conclusion. All collected data must be interpreted in terms of all the variables used in the study. This will enable researcher to compare the results of the instrument and see the truth or otherwise of the hypothesis. Accordingly, researcher is required in this section to enumerate the various statistical tests that would be or were conducted (descriptive or inferential statistics are generally used). Therefore, it is against this that this article gives a detailed step-by-step of statistical analysis that are generally used in analysing research data. Keywords: Measures of central tendency, measures of variability/dispersion, measures of associations, parametric and non-parametric statistics.

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