Statistics and Research: A Primer (For Competitive Exams)

Statistics from the begining of Mankind is often viewed as science of Counting, facts & figures and was associated with greek rulers & Kings, who widely used this Statistics to denote strength of armies, cavalry and the like in basic operations of Government in agriculture, taxation, irrigation, water shed managment, and so on; in other words it included all forms of collection, classification and enumeration of information in a scientific way. This is Statistics in the plural sense of the concept; With transition from primitive to Pastoral economy, and then on to modernization of the economy of modern government, Statistics widened its scope and was found to be used as a tool of measures like measures of central tendency, from averages like the mean , median and other measurable tools of Deviation & Dispersion of the given problems, mostly looked as problem solving sums & tools of Analysis; In Turn further measures of variation brought tools like Mean Deviation, Standard deviation, lorentz curves and Ogive curves also depict considerable inequality in the collected data. At the same time, Statistics, in singular sense, meansa host of tools and Techniques from basic. like Mean, deviation to advanced tools like multiple & multi variate Regression, chi distribution to multi scaling techniques, which are widely used as a research technique to study social tool & techniques or a means of researching a social phenomena; Therefore Statistics is both a tool for problem solving at the school level, and, at the same time, it cater to graduate as well as undergraduate students to understand this as tool of Research techniques; In this the role and use of Statistics is much wider and more impotant role, it addresses in different subject fields from exact physical sciences to behaviouial science like economics, commerce, business and in all fields of decision making from war games to finance & Operations Research. Therefore the main aim of this book is to make a Bridge, between Statistics as a Utility subject of "averages and variations & Dispersion" to a Tool-Set of research techniques to solving problem of society and the country at large. This book will help the graduate students to appear for competitive exams in national level, and will be of help to students aiming for a career in research institutions in India and at abroad. Thus Statistics as fundamental subject in exact to liberal sciences and is a powerful tool of decision-making. Finally a effort is made to explain the different statistical techniques in simple language, understandable to the common reader, appearing for competitive exams Signed, Dr. KS Velmurugan former Associate Professor of economics, KMGIPSR, Pondicherry