Educational Research - the Ethics and Aesthetics of Statistics

136 U. Stadler-Altmann and E. Keiner
9.1.2 And the Truth?
Scientific (and thus, statistical) thinking seeks for ways in which existing understanding
might be wrong, because such exceptions could illuminate the path towards
a better understanding of the truth.
Some disciplines see statistics in this way. Writers within these disciplines regard
statistical analysis as a gatekeeper to sound empirical research. Statistical significance
is the first requirement for publication in many areas of social science. For
example, social scientists discuss ‘evidence-based education’ which means selecting
treatments based on the best scientific (usually statistically based) evidence to
date. Educational statisticians often have to resist the popular impression that learning
how to use statistics is synonymous with learning how to lie with data. Those
who incorrectly believe that statistics is solely a branch of mathematics (and thus
algorithmic), often see the use of judgement in statistics as evidence that statisticians
do indeed manipulate their results. In their push to teach formulas and definitions,
they may fail to emphasise the important role played by judgement. The principle
guiding these judgements should be the honest search for ‘truth’ about the world,
and the principle of seeking such ‘truth’ should have a central place in discussions
about statistics and even in presentations. There is also a seeking for truth in poems
and in the discussion of poems as a way to understand our world. But the literate
audience do not assume that the poet lies, it knows something about the ‘magic’
of the poetic speech as a specific way to see the truth. Even statistics in social and
educational research is one way to look at our world and see the truth.
Of course, one can wield the tools of statistics to mislead. But even those who
repeat the quotation do not believe that the purpose of statistics is to mislead, or that
there is something fundamentally dishonest about statisticians. Statistics does not
lack respect because people think that statisticians are crooks. One way of showing
truth in oral statistical presentations is to fix the structure of a presentation. Then,
the scholarly audience finds similar structures in different research presentations and
feels safe and secure – the author has used the right methods. That helps to understand
the data and helps to accept the honesty of statistical use and the conclusions
drawn from it.
One of the major goals of statistics is to facilitate the discovery, understanding,
quantification, modelling, and communication of facts about the world. This is also
a major goal in poetry: to discover the world in a new way and to communicate the
experience of the author.
We probably could better understand some oral presentations of empirical studies,
if we see the presentation of quantitative results as a lyric presentation. In
qualitative research we could find a similar mode of presentation: Holley and Colyar
(2009) demonstrate the narrative structure of qualitative research and they use a theory
of narrative to deconstruct qualitative research texts. So, in our example we
could use the theory of poems and lyrics to try to deconstruct the oral presentation
of quantitative research presentations. Although research texts are a distinct genre
as compared to fiction, the basics components of lyric structure are sometimes similar
to those of research texts. In both areas the use of these components function