The Art of Data Analysis How to Answer Almost any Question Using Basic Statistics

KRISTIN H. JARMAN, PhD, is Senior Research Scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington, where she applies basic and not-so-basic statistical analyses to her own set of research challenges.

Preface ix

PART 1

The Basics

1. Statistics: The Life of the Party 3

2. Lions, and Tigers, and . . . Bigfoot? Oh, My:
How Questionable Data Can Screw Up an Otherwise Perfectly Good Statistical Analysis 7

3. Asteroid Belts and Spandex Cars: Using Descriptive Statistics to Answer Your Most Weighty Questions 23

4. Baseball, Game Shows, and Sidekicks: Who Cares about Probability Anyway? 43

5. What It’s Like to Be Normal: Probability Distributions and One Rule That Could Make You Wildly Popular 63

PART 2

What a Few Estimates and a Little Probability
Can Do for You

6. Men Are Insensitive and Women Are Illogical. Really: Asserting Your Stereotypes with Confidence 89

7. Godzilla versus King Kong: How Hypothesis Tests Can Be Used to Settle the Battle of the Movie Monsters 109

8. Lab Rats and Roommates: Analysis of Variance and How to Channel Your Inner Mad Scientist 129

9. When the Zombie Flu Went Viral: Regressing the Myth Out of Urban Myths 143

Appendix A: Critical Values for the Standard Normal Distribution 161

Appendix B: Critical Values for the T-Distribution 163

Appendix C: Critical Values for the Chi-Squared Distribution 165

Glossary 167

References 173

Index 175