This smaller group of accessible people whose data you actually collect is called your sample. Realistically, you’ll likely only get access to a few hundred, or maybe a few thousand owners using an online survey. However, it’s extremely unlikely that you’re going to be able to interview or survey every single Tesla owner in the US. For example, if you were interested in researching Tesla owners in the US, then the population would be all Tesla owners in the US. In statistics, the population is the entire group of people (or animals or organisations or whatever) that you’re interested in researching. These words are population and sample.įirst up, population. To understand the difference between these two branches of statistics, you need to understand two important words. Well, before I can explain that, we need to take a quick detour to explain some lingo. So, what are descriptive and inferential statistics?
Basic data analysis methods how to#
I’ll explain how to choose your methods later. In other words, depending on your research questions, aims and objectives. In your research, you might only use descriptive statistics, or you might use a mix of both, depending on what you’re trying to figure out. There are two main “branches” of statistical methods that are used – descriptive statistics and inferential statistics.
The two “branches” of quantitative analysisĪs I mentioned, quantitative analysis is powered by statistical analysis methods.