What are the roles of statistics in these fields?

Question

Please help me.
The fields are:
Medicine
Education
Military
Psychology
Sociology
Biology
Business
Agriculture
Engineering
Weather

Please tell me the role of statistics on one of these fields, better if more! Or all! No just joking, but please help.

Answer 1

In general, what statistics does is it tells us what is going on by giving us measurements. These measurements can then be used to evaluate things.

Medicine: We use statistics to determine how effective treatments are and whether or not they are safe. Say we have a new cancer drug and want to know if it is both safe and effective. We may test it out by undergoing an experimental procedure. We give one set of randomly chosen patients a "placebo" (a fake drug) and another the real one. After a certain amount of time, we try to see if there is a difference between the two groups. Before any drug gets to the human testing stage, it must first be evaluated on non-human subjects, such as in laboratories and on lab animals.
Education: We may want to know how many students are passing and failing, or how effective a teaching system is. Say you want to improve test scores and you have a new teaching system. You administer this to a group of random students- much like with a new drug- and try to determine if there are any differences between the treatment ("testing") group and the control (non-testing) group. If you cannot conduct an experiment, you simply try to observe a lot of students and try to see if the ones who are doing better also happen to be using the new teaching system.


The basic procedures of testing are the same throughout each of the fields. You can either conduct actual experiments, where you determine who is in your testing and control groups, or you can simply observe a large number of subjects and try to notice patterns or differences. Here are some other examples.

Military: test the effectiveness of a new weapons system.
Psychology: Statistics grew out of te desire by psychologists to measure things like intelligence and human behavior. Today, many psychologists are branching into biology, where they are testing hormone activity in the brain.
Sociology: We may want to determine the connection between handgun laws and violence.

At all these levels we try to understand the world by breaking it down into smaller components. We then try to find the patterns (statisticians call these "correlations"). For example, we might determine that a new brand of fertilizer is correlated with larger crops (agriculture).

Business-people are concerned with statistics that reveal how wella product or service is selling. Imagine that you are a huge corporation that sells pop soda, and you have a new TV advertisement that markets the soda. Is the advertisement effective? You may want to gather statistics about how consumers view the advertisement (either through directly asking them- such as through a poll or a panel where people sit down and answer questions face-to-face) or by observing the change in sales. If your sales grow drammatically right after you introduce the new ad, there is good reason to believe that part of that has to do with the ad itself.

Keep in mind that researchers always try to not immediately assume that correlation means causation. That is, just because two things tend to go together does not mean that either one causes the other. The only ways we can make sure that one thing does cause the other (for example, a good drug may "cause" a person to become healthier) is to rule out other possibilities. When we gather a lot of data ("statistics") about something, it helps us eliminate alternative possibilities. For example, when we administer a new drug to a treatment group, we want to make sure that they are not already taking a medication that may interfere with the outcome. Without doing this, we might think that the effectiveness of our drug comes entirely from it. In a sense, the "control" helps us remove some of that uncertainty, because it keeps everything but the treatment the same.

Answer 2

There are actually two parts to your question. The first part concerns what is the purpose of statisics. The second part is about the types of questions that are asked and set out to be answered in the fields you mention. When you put these parts together, what you are really asking is how statistics is used to answer the types of questions people working in the fields tend to ask.

Generally speaking, statistics (essentially, a set of mathematical tools) are used to assess whether phenomena observed in the various fields are happening by chance. If the statistics indicates that things are happening by chance, then the investigators conclude that nothing interesting is happening. If the statistics indicates that things are not happening by chance, then the conclusion is that something important is happening. Based on this basic idea, you can think up just about any question that you can think about that would seem relevant for the fields that you mention, do a scientific study, and then use statistics to determine whether your study says something is "statistically significant" (i.e., not happening by chance/important) or "not statistically significant (i.e., happening by chance/not important).

So as examples:

Medicine: Does giving drug X to patients make them feel better to a statistically significant degree than giving no drug (e.g., a placebo) at all?

Education: Do students do better at school X, with teacher X, or with textbook X, etc. than school Y, teacher Y, or textbook Y, etc?

Military: Are there less fatalities when soldiers are trained with combat technique X than no combat technique at all?

Weather: If various industries cut down on their gas emissions, will that significantly reduce the depletion of the ozone layer?

Basically, if you know what types of important questions that professionals are likely to ask in each area, these questions can be answered (scientifically) by asking a question, turning it into a research study, with the ultimate result being that the research study will tell you whether the answer (results) from your study are statistically significant or not. If it is statistically significant, then it supports the question being asked. If it is not statistically significant, there is no (scientific) support for the answer.

Answer 3

Can tell you about medicine.

Statistics is the core of EVIDENCE-BASED MEDICINE. It is statistics that equates / links / refutes / proves diseases and its proposed causes. The same goes for diseases and medications. With statistics, medicine is no more based on hearsay, 'because my professor used to do that', hunch or personal experience.