Statistical Methods in Education and Psychology: A Critical Perspective

Abstract

This paper offers a sympathetic, but critical, perspective on selected statistical methods relevant to both educational and psychological research. I argue that the classical statistical procedures used in these fields should, where appropriate, be deployed in the service of a more liberal realist conception of research. In this regard, it is claimed that the principal function of statistical methods is to help us detect robust empirical phenomena. With this in mind, I suggest that exploratory factor analysis is a quasi-statistical method that serves an important role in the generation of new theory. A sceptical attitude to the commonly used methods of statistical significance testing is encouraged, together with the suggestion that Bayesian methods can serve a legitimate role in scientific inference. In addition, the regular use of exploratory data analytic methods is urged in conjunction with computer intensive resampling methods. Critical, but constructive, suggestions are made about the recently developed meta-analytic and causal modelling methods.