When I think of research, I think of numbers. As a mathematician, a baseball coach, and a carpenter, I can't escape the world of numbers. I probably more fluent in the language of numbers than I am in English. I am able to manipulate and interpret numbers very easily so when I do research, I always look to the statistics for the information I need. I feel that research has no value without the statistics but you have to be careful when reading them. As the old saying goes, you can use statistics to prove anything, 70% of people know that. Its not just a matter if a study has statistics but also how they got the numbers, who got the numbers, who they got the numbers from, and so on.
As a math teacher, I teach statistics as part of my various courses and in fact, teach my students how to collect data and turn it into useful pieces of information. When do any kind of research or data collection, I've found that it helps to be consistent every time you do something, whether it is dropping a ball from certain height or asking a question to a group of people, consistency breeds results. If something is changed, however minor it may be, while doing research, the data you get may have no baring on anything as it has become null and void since certain parameters of the data collection were altered. Whenever I'm reading somebody else's research, I try to find out how consistent they were in their data collection or I will just move on to the next piece of research.
One of the reasons I love using statistics is because numbers don't lie. Sure, you could manipulate the raw data so it tells you want you want but for the most part, the numbers mean something tangible that we can visualize and grasp. If I told somebody that 15 out of 18 students in my class passed the final exam, that would mean the same thing to anybody I told it to. 15 passed and 3 did not. I cannot change that fact so when working with statistics, its never been hard to understand what they mean. At the same time, numbers don't tell the whole story. There are certain intangible factors that can never be expressed through numbers. Going back to the example above, why did the 3 fail the exam or what types of households do the students come from, something that cannot always be expressed through numbers themselves but are just as important when figuring out what to do with the data.
