Last week, teaching my statistics class, I gave an example of regression using actual data. I had hypothesized that given the greater discrimination and poverty on the reservation 40 or 50 years ago, there would be a negative relationship between age and educational attainment within the adult population. That is, people over 60 would be less likely to have obtained a high school diploma, associate’s degree or bachelor’s degree than those under 40.<\/p>\n
To get to the point – I was wrong. I deleted the outliers on both age and education. I was still wrong. The students were waiting for me to do the next analysis to prove that I was right but there was no next analysis. It seems that, at least for the population I had sampled, I was simply wrong.<\/p>\n
I try to do this at least two or three times during the semester with every course I teach. \u00a0The first time, the students are always surprised. We present research in textbooks in such a neat, linear fashion – you have a hypothesis, you collect data, analyze data, reject the null hypothesis, write up your conclusions and either publish your results or pick up a fat speaker fee to talk about your brilliant study.<\/p>\n
It doesn’t always work that way. One advantage of being a small company with multiple clients is that we aren’t so tied to anyone that we feel that we MUST produce certain findings. I’ve worked for pharmaceutical companies, educational institutions – you name it. All of my clients are really smart, competent people. If I didn’t believe that, I wouldn’t be working with them – you only get one life and why waste it with people who aren’t rewarding to work with? No matter how smart, educated, experienced and hard-working you are, sometimes the results don’t come out the way you expected.<\/p>\n
The profoundest lesson my advisor, Dr. Richard Eyman, taught me was,<\/p>\n
“The data show what they show.”<\/strong><\/p>\n Sometimes they show that you are wrong. Not only do you have to accept that, you even have to expect it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Last week, teaching my statistics class, I gave an example of regression using actual data. I had hypothesized that given the greater discrimination and poverty on the reservation 40 or 50 years ago, there would be a negative relationship between age and educational attainment within the adult population. That is, people over 60 would be…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2773","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dr-de-mars-general-life-ramblings","category-statistics"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2773","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2773"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2773\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2775,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2773\/revisions\/2775"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2773"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2773"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2773"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}