Introduction to Statistics

What is Statistics? Statistics is simply the process by which we collect, analyse and interpret data. What is data? Data can simply be defined as a raw fact, a raw fact in its natural form makes no sense and as a manager you must be able to interpret data. When data becomes processed it is called Information. However, data and information can be used interchangeably. For example: you launched a new product in your organization and you want to know the perception of the customers about the product, this data does not exist, you need to generate the data but if the data exist it will come inform of a report, this report can now assist you in calculating risks.

Sources of Data

There are two sources of data. We have the Primary Data and the Secondary Data.

Primary Data: Where data does not exist and you need to generate the data yourself, it is called Primary Data such as survey, experiment, focus groups, questionnaires, observation (some data you want you will want to observe it yourself).

Secondary Data: Where someone else has done the research and done the data for us, it is called Secondary Data, they are also called Processed Data such as Financial Statements, Nigerian Stock Exchange reports and Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) reports just to mention a few.

Nature of Data

What is the nature of the data we collect?

Quantitative Data: They are called quantitative data because they deal with numbers. It is important to note that quantitative data are type of data that we can apply arithmetic operations on it. For example: if we gather all the phone numbers in a community, we cannot perform arithmetic operations on these numbers hence, for quantitative data we must be able to perform arithmetic operations on it.

Qualitative Data: It is also called Categorical Data. It is a non-numerical data, they just describe and qualify.

How we collect our data is very important because this will determine how we are going to analyse it. Once you collect data, the next thing is for you to observe the source of the data whether it is primary or secondary data. Then you will look at what is the nature of the data? If it is qualitative or quantitative and also look at the timing of the data. The objective of statistics is to help you make informed decisions, it helps you to plan, it helps for comparison and to calculate risk.

We have some basic statistical concepts such as:

Population: Population refers to a data set. For example: the totality of your observation (primary data). It might take time for you to collect the data and put it together.

Sample: A part of the population and most of the time we use this sample to generalize for the whole population. Hence, the larger the sample the closer it is to the result of the population.

Variables: This is a type of data that keeps changing, it could be qualitative or quantitative.

In conclusion, whenever we are carrying out a study or research, you cannot be 100 percent accurate of your data because you might have all the data you need but you can be 99 percent sure of the data and you give 1 percent for error, the 99 percent is called the Confidence Level while the 1 percent is called the Level of Significance.

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