Educational Research - the Ethics and Aesthetics of Statistics

176 P. Smeyers
conditions. It is in this case not an argument (a logical structure with premises and conclusions
governed by some rule of acceptance), but rather a presentation of the conditions relevant to
the occurrence of the event, and a statement of the degree of probability of the event given
these conditions. Evidently, a persistent statistical correlation – a genuine statistical-relevance
relation – is strongly indicative of a causal relation of some sort, but one should not confuse
statistical correlation with genuine causation. This would be to conflate symptoms with causes.
2. Fea, V. (Producer), & Phillips, M. (Director). (2002). Waking the dead. Deathwatch (Season 2,
Episode 2). London: BBC.
3. Vercel, E., & Lassa, C. (Producer), & Heynemann, L. (Director). (2003). Maigret et le clochard
[Maigret and the dosser]. Paris: Dune France 2. (Based on a novel by G. Simenon)
4. They use what they call a widely accepted notion of analytical statistics as the mathematical
process of manipulating survey data in an attempt to reach ‘well-founded’ conclusions which
generalize across the region and time-period from whence the data came. The analytical methods
can be seen as including regression as well as some exploratory methods such as factor
analysis (cf. Olsen, & Morgan, 2005, p. 280, footnote 1).
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