Educational Research - the Ethics and Aesthetics of Statistics

Chapter 11
Statistics and the Inference to the Best
Explanation: Living Without Complexity?
Paul Smeyers
11.1 The Scope of the Envisaged Problem:
Statistics and ‘Making Sense of Them’
Statistics are everywhere. In their descriptive mode they often indicate the level of
satisfaction of clients/customers of post offices and hospitals, of one’s use of an
email system (e.g. Eudora), of the number of downloads (provided by publishers
of journals), and are gathered for various purposes (including to evaluate scholarly
conferences such as AERA). This may be innocent as far as it goes, but it
carries with it a number of presuppositions that should not necessarily be taken
for granted. One of these is that it is possible to represent reality (and have a grip
on it), shifting often to the simple equation that this is the reality we belong to.
This either implies that (1) there is nothing else to know about a subject or (2) if
there is anything else to know, this is still the best way to deal with reality, the one
that is the least harmful and most objective. Another presupposition (or should one
say promise) that descriptive statistics carry with them is the possibility of control,
particularly when an explanation is offered (by this we mean the control of the evolution
of dependent variables in terms of the independent variables which have led
to the distributions that are offered or the correlations that may be observed). Thus
a paradigm of (quasi-)causality enters that goes together with estimation and management
of risk (this applies in the case of experiments as it does for randomized
field trials). At the same time, the attraction of statistics lies in its simplicity (the
reduction of the variability of the data to as few ‘factors’ as possible, as few homogeneous
classes as the data permit, even for N=1 studies where a simple formula is
strived for or if more variables are dealt with, where the interaction between them
is estimated/calculated), as well as in the accompanying belief that it is possible to
characterize reality and the way it shapes our lives. Though what has been outlined
so far may well be recognized (or deplored) by many, there is a more complex story
P. Smeyers (B)
Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium
P. Smeyers, M. Depaepe (eds.), Educational Research: The Ethics and Aesthetics
of Statistics, Educational Research 5, DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-9873-3_11,
C○ Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010
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