Social Sciences and Statistics

In: World politics: a quarterly journal of international relations, Band 25, Heft 1, S. 145-154

Abstract

Statistics is the one discipline in which people have concentrated almost exclusively on how to collect and analyze data. Statisticians have been doing this as a goal in itself without having to be encumbered by substantive issues arising from some other discipline. Most of their work can be broken into components that fall in one of three categories: data gathering, data reduction (descriptive statistics), and statistical inference.