 defining statistics. I've been teaching statistics for so many years like 16 17 years and every time I enter the class I see almost the similar faces. Over the last 15 years I haven't seen much change in students attitude or students kind of you know first you know reaction toward the word statistics like why statistics and why statistics in psychology and they have so many myths about statistics that it's hard we opted for psychology just to stay away from statistics why we are teaching why we are studying it it's gonna drive me crazy it's gonna be very tough oh my god I can't do statistics and I have even seen teachers like professors and my friends and colleagues even they will just say that oh statistics is really hard like you say I'm getting a K Air Mujee Punjabi wonnie me aty. So there are certain attitudes and certain perception about statistics and the first reaction most commonly and on average I have seen in students particularly in under that students that statistics is something really tough and it's gonna you know drive us crazy but today we will talk about statistics actually is really not that tough or statistics is the kind of thing that our first reaction should be like it's really the coolest thing in psychology because I know that we all say that psychology is a science and by end of the your undergrad degree even you will be getting BS or MSc in psychology so it's a science degree and what actually is making psychology science basically because statistics is a one magical kind of thing or a magical van which gonna you know take any objective thing you will collect data we will talk later in our lecture today but you can collect data and you can take the observations you can run few analysis and you can report the results in a very objective way and in a very empirical way. Statistics is really coolest thing and it's really magical to me because we get answers to the questions that we really are entrusted only through the help of statistics. Similarly, in psychology, our stigma is that if a psychology student is meeting somebody in any social gathering or anywhere, the first reaction is that you are a psychology student, tell us about ourselves. So I always think or my students we say that we are not magicians that we're gonna tell you what's gonna happen what's going on in your head but you are thinking we are just psychologists but yes actually we can tell people attitudes we can tell their perception we can tell their thinking patterns we can tell their preferences we can tell their likes dislikes their personality their cognitive abilities and there's so many things about life by using research and statistics like we ask them a couple of questions and then we you know see where the questions are coming from link them with the research and design and run the analysis and yes we can give you answer on that that what kind of personality you have what kind of cognitive abilities thinking patterns preferences all those things. So, Pela Meera appeals, all students say again statistics is really something that is coolest in psychology and it's a kind of such a wonderful and amazing thing that you really get all what you really want to know using statistics. So how we define statistics basically the term is refers to a set of mathematical procedures for organizing summarizing and interpreting information. For example, if your class go my Pela test do or failure assignment do or may up supposing the hundred students are registered for this course and they get the first assignment and that assignment is of 10 marks and each one of you will be getting some score out of 10. So, may be pass 100 data points are going to make it so sophisticated that I can summarize and I can organize and I can present the data in a very smart way. If you ask me how students are performing, I can just tell the whole hundred observations in one score, average score on the first assignment in the virtual classes is kind of 6 out of 10 or 10 or 10 or 10 or 10 or 10 or 10 or 10 or 10 or 10 or 10 or 10 or 10 or 10 or 10 or 10 or 10 or or maybe 7 out of 10. So we can just not only collect data but we can organize in a frequency distribution kind of thing in a graphical sort of thing and then we can present data in a smart way. Statistics is the science of designing studies or experiments, collecting data and analyzing data for the purpose of scientific discovery. Just I have just said that we are just collecting data and we analyze it and we get the answer. So statistics help us in designing the studies and then analyzing the data and reaching to some conclusion or answer. Statistics is a science of learning from data. I always remember when I was at Michigan Tech in my professor used to tell me, Saima always feel the data, Saima look at the data, data definitely is telling you a story, learn from the data, what is telling you and now I realize that yes, every time you collect the data, it's just learning from data and every data we collect on any topic actually has a story inside it and that a researcher or a true scientist need to explore what the data is, what the data is and what the data is telling. So statistics and it is a tool that actually help you, you know, kind of get story out of the data and learn from that data. Specifically stats serves two general purposes. Number one, that we can communicate the results through statistics and then we can answer the questions that we are looking through scientific research or scientific inquiry. The statistics mainly summing up, it deals with the collection of the data, number two, organizing, summarizing the data, number three, analyzing the data and then finally making inference or decisions and procedures, predictions about the data. Mainly, in psychology, we are more interested in predictions and inference. So the fourth point that we are looking through is that we are interested in predictions and inference. So the fourth point or fourth objective would be more important in our course so that we can see how we can study a small sample and draw inference about the population. Statistics is important. Even if we don't work on numbers, we have to bring numbers and we have to tell anything, any answer, any solution, kind of quantifiable way, in objective way. So basically I say psychological research only makes sense when you are able to understand statistics.