1.1: Why are you taking this course?

Why must you take a stats class when you are not a math major? There are probably dozens of answers to why this class is required, but we’ll focus on a couple reasons related to your future career, and a few reasons related to being a critically-thinking adult. The one that is probably most compelling to you right now is:

Understanding statistics will help make you better in your future career.

Whether you become a therapist, a social worker, a police officer, a nurse, or run a business, you should read research from your field, and understand the statistical results. You are being trained to think like a manager or supervisor. To make decisions in your career, you’ll need to understand and apply the results of statistical analyses of others in your field. Understanding statistical analyses will help you make decisions based on evidence. What you will learn in this class can help you show that your program (or your decision) is statistically significantly better than the alternatives.

Every career that Dr. MO can think of has people doing research to see how to be better. Whether your goal is to work as a therapist or work in social services, criminal justice, education, health care, business, or pretty much any field, really, there’s a whole wealth of research on how to help clients’ mental health and life situations, prevent crime and improve jury decision-making, improve learning, improve health, or increase sales. As a profession, you should read the research from your field. That research will often include results of statistical analyses. Rather than having to trust the researchers themselves, or (gasp) a summary generated by AI (artificial intelligence), you will be able to understand the statistical results yourself by the end of this textbook. Understanding statistical analyses will help you make decisions based on evidence. What you will learn in this class can help you show that your program (or your decision) is statistically significantly better than the alternatives.

What you might not know right now, but will know as you progress in your career, is that much of what you will be doing is documenting what you did, and how it worked. That leads us to a second major reason for taking this course:

You will need to report evidence to show that what you are doing helps your clients/students/patients/customers.

It turns out that organizations only want to continue funding activities that are effective. It will be much easier to persuade your supervisor you need additional resources or get support from your community because you can show that what you’re doing is working. This evidence comes from analyzing, interpreting, and reporting data from your program. 

Historical Context

Florence Nightingale (1820–1910) is considered the mother of modern nursing.  As a British nurse, she also urged governments to keep good records and be guided by statistical evidence (Wikipedia).  She was influenced by Belgian astronomer Adolphe Quetelet (1796–1874) who named what we call the social sciences as social physics, by analogy with celestial physics (Encyclopedia.com). 

Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\):The Lady with the Lamp or Miss Nightingale at Scutari. Popular lithograph reproduction of a painting of Nightingale by Henrietta Rae from Wellcome Collection gallery. CC-BY-4.0, Public Domain

But why do colleges require any math class? After teaching behavioral statistics for almost 15 years, Dr. MO has noticed some outcomes related to how students think at the end of the course. First:

Learning statistical analyses develops critical thinking.

As you learn how to analyze, interpret, and report data, you’ll practice following a process and using available information to make logical decisions. You’ll need to decide what analyses you can do with the data that is collected or provided, decide how to apply the equations to your data, decide what the analyses results are telling you, decide the most appropriate way to report your results, and sometimes you’ll be asked to make recommendations based on the results. That’s a lot of thinking!

While this might sound overwhelming, there are steps that you’ll follow. Practicing following a process is another way that you’ll be developing your critical thinking. Some of you are naturally more detail-oriented or organized than others, but you all can become better at following a process. By doing the work in this textbook and your class, you’ll be developing this skill! Being a critical thinker will help you avoid scams and being taken advantage of, and, of course, you’ll be better at any job or career if you are good at following directions, staying organized, and identifying any breakdown of logic in processes or when someone’s trying to convince you that their way is the right way.

Another way that this class will change how you think is through something that Dr. MO calls “math literacy”. Math literacy is like a combination of statistical literacy (the ability to understand and reason with statistics and data) and numeracy (the ability to understand, reason with, and apply simple numerical concepts).

Understanding how numbers work will help you make predictions and spot inaccurate information.

As you practice with some of the more complex equations, you’ll want to know if you’re doing things correctly before you get to the end. You’ll want to make some guesses on what the results should be, then compare your guesses to what your calculator is telling you. You can tell if you’ve gone off track earlier in the process if you have a sense of how numbers work and how mathematical operations work. For example, sometimes Dr. MO wants to put her class of 35 into groups of three. To know how many groups she will need, she could divide 35 by 3. But before she does that on a calculator, she knows that 36 divided by 3 is 12, so the calculator should show her a number close to 12. The actual number is 11.67 (rounded to two decimal points), which is pretty close to 12!

For more on why your major may require a statistics class, watch this short TED Talk by Arthur Benjamin:

Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): Arthur Benjamin's TED Talk on statistics before calculus. (CC-BY-NC-ND TED Talks via YouTube or TED Talks directly)

A bonus benefit of learning how to analyze, interpret, and report data is that some of you will fall in love with statistics, and become a researcher for a living! This isn’t a reason why you have to take the course, but it is a happy accident for those of you who want to help people, but tend to be more logical rather than emotional (like Dr. MO!). According to this American Psychological Association (APA) article, there are jobs out there for folks who like statistics.

Note

Compare and Contrast:  How are Dr. MO's reasons for taking this course similar to Dr. Navarro's reasons in her Statistics in Psychology page?  How do the reasons differ?  

What about AI?

You might be wondering how much of this artificial intelligence (AI), like ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude, can do. From Dr. MO’s limited experience:

• Understanding statistics will help make you better in your future career.
  • AI can summarize reports, but only you can apply those findings to your clients. While AI might act like it can answer questions about your specific clients, only you should be deciding how the research results relate to specific individuals or situations.
• You will need to report evidence to show that what you are doing helps your clients/students/patients/customers.
  • AI can provide some data summary and reporting, and will likely be able to do most in the near future. However, some AI results are wildly incorrect. But how would you know that if you didn’t do the analyses yourself, too?
• Learning statistical analyses develops critical thinking.
  • If you rely on AI to do your thinking, then you will not develop better thinking skills. It’s just that simple.
• Understanding how numbers work will help you make predictions and spot inaccurate information.
  • Again, if you have AI do the work then you are not developing the skills to understand how numbers work and recognize when something is off.

But sometimes the question isn’t “Can AI do this?”, but “What are the expectations. For each of the reasons why this course is required, consider:

1. Would your future university want AI to do this goal, rather than you? Why or why not?
2. Would your future employers want AI to do this goal, rather than you? Why or why not?
3. Would your future clients want AI to do this goal, rather than you? Why or why not?

While you might think that Dr. MO’s answer to all of these may be “no,” that’s just not the case. Your university professors may want you to understand how AI works so that you can use it effectively in the future. Your future employer may not care if you can think critically, as long as the project is completed (and is accurate). Your future clients probably want you to help them individually, but you could use AI in the background to help with other tasks.

Now that you’ve thought about why this course might be required, let’s understand a little more about what this course will be about!