In related news, in scientific journal articles, I'd say that the hardest part is almost always the statistical analysis to determine significance of data. I hope that the combination of my statistics class and this class will help me understand this better. It also doesn't help that it's usually written very densely in very technical paragraph-form. Which is also the case for most "Materials & Methods" sections, which are very frequently filled with very technical jargon and little fluidity.
Finally, the Baron & Kenny (1986) paper gave me some trouble - I still don't think I quite know the difference between mediators and moderators.
Yay for addressing confusions! All in this together?
I definitely agree with your confusion about the significance of data. The p-values we use differ between researchers/types of experiments, and this makes it really confusing! The technical jargon is also confusing sometimes- unless we are in the specific field from which the paper stems, we may not know what the terms mean. Also, I love the Ryan Gosling pic from your last post :)
ReplyDeleteHey Lucie, it turns out I'm taking stat this year too! I understand statistics pretty well but what gets me is the technical/discipline specific jargon scientific papers tend to use. I also completely agree with you about the materials and methods sections. I tend to understand the abstract, results, and conclusions but the materials and methods section always take much deciphering.
ReplyDeleteThe statistical analysis has always been the most confusing part of papers for me too. It's just fundamentally a difficult thing to comprehend since there's so much processing that goes into it. I took a stats course this semester too, and after finishing my final paper for the course, I feel that my understanding has improved, but it's definitely the greatest struggle of the field in my opinion.
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