Mark Louie Ramos in The Conversation:
As a statistician involved in research for many years, I know the care that goes into designing a good study capable of coming up with meaningful results. Understanding what the results of a particular study are and are not saying can help you sift through what you see in the news or on social media.
Let me walk you through the scientific process, from investigation to publication. The research results you hear about crucially depend on the way scientists formulate the questions they’re investigating.
Researchers in all kinds of fields use the scientific method to investigate the questions they’re interested in.
First, a scientist formulates a new claim – what’s called a hypothesis. For example, is having some genetic mutations in BRCA genes related to a higher risk of breast cancer? Then they gather data relevant to the hypothesis and decide, based on the data, whether that initial claim was correct or not.
It’s intuitive to think that this decision is cleanly dichotomous – that the researcher decides the hypothesis is either true or false. But of course, just because you decide something doesn’t mean you’re right.
More here.
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